THE GOSPEL AND 
THE MODERN MAN 

SHAILER MATHEWS 




Class 



Book. 



.V\43 



CopyiightlJ". 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



Haberfora Hiiirarg fLertureg 



THE GOSPEL AND THE 
MODERN MAN 



•The 




THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 



THE GOSPEL AxND THE 
MODERN MAN 



BY 



SHAILER MATHEWS 

PROFESSOR OF HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE THEOLOGY 

IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO; AUTHOR OF "THE 

SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS," "THE MESSIANIC 

HOPE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT," "THE 

CHURCH AND THE CHANGING 

ORDER," ETC. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1910 

All rights reserved 






Copyright, 1910, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published May, 1910. 



J. S. Gushing Co, — Berwick & Smith Co. 
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



©CLA261703 



CONTENTS 

PART I 

THE PROBLEM OF THE GOSPEL 

CHAPTER I 

PAGB 

The Gospel of the New Testament . . . . i 
The gospel in our modern society. I. The question 
of method. The distinction between Christianity as a 
contemporary religion and the gospel. The method of 
a positive evangelical theology. — II. The gospel as con- 
tained in the New Testament, i . In the Synoptic Gospels. 
The teaching of Jesus. Place of Apocalyptic in his 
teaching. His messianic self-consciousness. 2. The 
teaching of the apostles. Christ as a deliverer from 
Satan, sin, and death. 3. Is there more than one gospel 
in the New Testament? The relation of Paul to Jesus 
one of elaboration rather than of fundamental difference. 
4. The function of Apocalyptic. — III. The gospel in its 
New Testament form involves historical elements, i. The 
historical experiences of Jesus and the apostles. 2. The 
gospel as the product of historical development: 
(a) Messianism as a world-view ; ((5) Two final thought- 
forces of the Jewish social mind ; (<:) Sacrifice ; (<^) So- 
cial ideals of the ancient world. — IV. The gospel in the 
New Testament although eschatological not wholly 
other-worldly. 

CHAPTER II 
The Modern Man 35 

Elements common to the New Testament and modern 
times. I. Four fundamental differences between the 

vii 



viii CONTENTS 

PAGE 

two periods. I. The modern age primarily scientific and 
controlled by the conception of process. The struggle 
toward free personality. The supremacy of the historical 
spirit. 2. God now conceived of as immanent in uni- 
versal process rather than as a monarch. The question 
of miracle. 3. The modern world filled with a sense of 
social solidarity. Differences between such conceptions 
and the social inequalities of the New Testament period. 
4. The modern world demands a scientific and empirical 
basis of truth as contrasted with authority and meta- 
physics. Universality of this attitude of mind. Diffi- 
culties arising from these four classes of differences. — 
II. Who is the modern man? i. Not necessarily con- 
temporary persons. 2. Nor merely the man in revolt 
against the past. 3. The modern man is he who is con- 
trolled by the forces making To-morrow. — III. Objec- 
tions to this definition, i. It gives too little prominence 
to theological reconstruction. 2. It gives too much 
prominence to theology. 



CHAPTER III 

The Content of the Gospel 63 

Why should we attempt to bring the gospel rather than 
a revised Christian system to the modern man? I. Two 
current methods of adjusting the gospel to our modern 
age. I. The method of literalism and its dangers. 2. The 
method of a philosophy of religion indifferent to the 
New Testament. — II. The method of historical resolu- 
tion and interpretative equivalents, i. The method in 
general. 2. Messianism as the interpretative and syste- 
matizing concept. 3. Result of such process as express- 
ing the content of the gospel. 4. The content of the 
gospel one of life rather than of philosophy. — III. Doc- 
trine-making as a social process. The method of finding 
equivalents for the constructive and interpretative con- 
ception of the New Testament, i. The equivalent for 
the sovereignty of God. 2. The equivalent for escha- 



CONTENTS IX 



tology as a method of portraying: (a) the teleology 
of social evolution ; (3) personal immortality and resur- 
rection ; {c) causality in the moral order. 3. The 
equivalent for messianic salvation. — IV. The gospel as 
a message of salvation, an exposition of the possibilities 
of the spiritual life and order. Forecast of further dis- 
cussion. 



PART II 

THE REASONABLENESS OF THE GOSPEL 

CHAPTER IV 

Jesus the Christ 91 

The gospel conceives of Jesus as primarily a savior 
rather than a teacher ; as historical rather than as ideal. 
I. The gospel as amenable to the laws governing histori- 
cal investigation, i. Universal recognition of the his- 
torical aspect of the gospel. Radical criticism. 2. The 
gospels as historical documents. 3. The gospels as 
records of primitive Christian faith rather than of objec- 
tive facts. The case of the resurrection of Jesus. — 11. The 
Jesus of history, i. In the Synoptic Gospels. 2. In the 
Pauline literature. 3. In the Johannine literature. Gen- 
eral conclusion. — III. The Christ of experience, i. The 
content of the term " Christ." 2. Jesus as the embodi- 
ment of the absolute moral supremacy of the spiritual 
life. In what sense he was sinless. 3. Jesus as the 
object of religious worship. 4. An existential conception 
of the person of Christ demanded by judgment of his 
moral worth. The New Testament explanations of his 
person. — IV. Modern equivalents of the Hellenistic doc- 
trine of the two natures. A Christological creed inevita- 
ble for the modern man. Evangelicalism as distinguished 
from orthodoxy. 



X CONTENTS 

CHAPTER V 

PAGE 

The Love of the God of Law 139 

The universal sense of weakness. I. The problem of 
physical evil, i . Satan as an explanation of evil. 2. The 
immanence of God and evil. — II. Is God Love ? i . The 
prior question as to the existence of God. 2. The prob- 
lem of evil: (i) The answer of Christian Science; 
(2) The answer of Jesus. 3. What is deliverance from 
evil? — III. The gospel and pessimism, i. The growth 
of pessimism. 2. The indifference of the " superman." 
— IV. The courage of the cross. 



CHAPTER VI 

The Forgiveness of Sin 161 

The place of sin in life. I. The nature of sin. I. The 
teaching of Jesus. 2. The teaching of Paul. 3. The 
modern equivalent for the evangelic conception of sin. 
Corporate sin. 4. Three alarming facts; the ease, the 
socialization, and the pleasure of sin. — II. The evangelic 
warning against sin. i. The gospel's exposition of the 
danger of sin. The modern man's conception of punish- 
ment. 2. Sin as the violation of God's will. 3. The 
reasonableness of the belief in the punishment of sin. 
4. The power of Jesus to awake moral shame. — HI. De- 
liverance from sin as a spiritual process, i. Deliverance 
of sin not identical with complete moral perfection. 
2. The Pauline doctrine of justification of faith. The 
regenerate power of the divine spirit appropriated through 
faith in Jesus as Christ. — IV. The question of the moral 
order involved in the forgiveness of sin. The Pauline 
doctrine of atonement. — V. The doctrine of the atone- 
ment in the history of Christianity: i. The early con- 
ceptions of ransom, sacrifice, and satisfaction; 2. The 
permanent element in the Christian consciousness lying 
back of theories of the atonement. — VI. The significance 
of the death of Christ to the modern man. i. His death 
as an exposition of the justice of the moral order: Ci3 As 



CONTENTS XI 

PAGE 

involvedin the socialization of other effects of sin ; (2) As 
regards suffering resulting from altruistic service. 2. His 
suffering a testimony to the divine love: (i) Jesus' faith 
in such love ; (2) What is really meant by the forgive- 
ness of sins ; (3) The resurrection as a complement of 
the death of Christ. 3. The death of Christ as an expo- 
sition of the ethical unity of God. — VII. The forgiveness 
of sins positive as well as negative. 

CHAPTER VII 

The Deliverance from Death 208 

A belief in immortality is the answer of the race to 
the challenge of death. 1. The place of death in the 
New Testament, i . Hebrew and Jewish views. 2. Early 
Christian conception of the resurrection and of death as 
a punishment of sin. — II. The a priori objection to the 
resurrection weakened by the following considerations: 
I. A belief in immortality involved in our knowledge of 
life ; 2. The spiritual individual rather than society the 
outcome of the evolutionary process ; 3. Argument from 
the subliminal self ; 4. Prospect of scientific demonstra- 
tion of the future life. — III. The resurrection of Jesusj. 

1. Starting-point of the faith of the early disciples. 

2. Hypothetical explanations of this belief. — IV. The 
content of the disciples' experience of the risen Christ. 
I. Pauline beliefs the point of departure. 2. The gospels' 
account of the resurrection as compared with the Pauline. 

3. The resurrection as distinguished from the ascension. 
— V. The resurrection of Jesus as an exposition of the 
finality of the spiritual life. I. The resurrection more 
than a mere wonder. 2. Its significance to the modern 
man. 



XU CONTENTS 

PART III 

THE POWER OF THE GOSPEL 

CHAPTER VIII 

PAGE 

The Test of Life 239 

Summary of the preceding discussion. I. The general 
grounds for the alleged impracticability of the gospel. 
I. An oriental religion. 2. Its individualism. — II. Spe- 
cific grounds for denial of its practicability, i. Its ap- 
peal to rewards and punishments. 2. Will to power vs. 
love. 3. Love inferior to justice. 4. Excessive ethical 
idealism. 5. Alleged ad interim ethics. 6. The funda- 
mental struggle between the non-religious modern man 
and spiritual order. 

CHAPTER IX 

The New Life in Christ 272 

The gospel must submit to the test of immediate effi- 
ciency. I. The meaning of salvation, i. In the teach- 
ing of Jesus. The identity of the eternal life with the 
spiritual life, to gain which is to be saved. 2. In the 
teaching of Paul. Life in the Spirit and in Christ iden- 
tical with the triumph of the spiritual life. — II. The 
psychology of the spiritual life. i. The gospel as "sug- 
gestion." 2. The gospel as the ideal governing religious 
impulse. 3. The gospel as presenting the faith evoking 
Jesus. — III. The gospel as a way to spiritual regenera- 
tion through the spirit of God. i. The spiritual life not 
to be explained wholly in terms of psychology. 2. Re- 
ligion as a search for reconciliation with God. 3. Moral 
regeneration through spiritual life, because of reconcilia- 
tion and union with the Holy Spirit. — IV. The con- 
tinuity of Christian experience as an expression of the 
spiritual life despite doctrinal variations. 



CONTENTS Xlll 

CHAPTER X 

PAGE 

The Power of the Social Gospel 299 

I. The social significance of the spiritual life. i. The 
kingdom of God in the teaching of Jesus. 2. The 
struggle between the spiritual and the materialistic 
orders. — 11. The power of socialized hatred. i. The 
social power of the gospel commensurate with its power 
to rouse a hatred of sin. 2. The place of tolerance in 
the spiritual life. — III. The function of the church as 
the social expression of the spiritual life resulting from the 
gospel. I. The modern man's obligation to the church. 
2. The development of social sympathy. 3. The social- 
izing of the spiritual life, the supreme social function of 
the church. 4. The spiritualizing of the new formative 
forces in society. 5. The social meaning of the cross. 
6. The insistence on faith in the working of God in 
society. — IV. The problem of a divided church. Con- 
clusion. 

Index 329 



THE GOSPEL AND THE 
MODERN MAN 

PART I 

THE PROBLEM OF THE GOSPEL 

CHAPTER I 

THE GOSPEL OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 

Is the gospel of the New Testament to be "the 
power of God unto salvation" for the modem man? 
Or must it be replaced by a philosophy of religious 
values that reduces the historical Jesus to a creature 
of the unwarranted faith of Galilean fishermen, and 
changes the church into a polite audience listening 
to discussions of social reform ? 

These questions are not merely rhetorical. Chris- 
tianity was founded upon the Christ of the New 
Testament. The history of the church is the history 
of an attempt to make that Christ the inspiration 
for Godlike living and the basis of an assurance of 
divine forgiveness. Philosophies have come and 

B I 



2 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

gone, theologies have been supplanted by newer 
doctrines, but the gospel of a way of salvation re- 
vealed by a real Jesus has been the perennial source 
of constructive Christian experience. Now, however, 
we are told that the gospel in its original New Testa- 
ment sense cannot be combined with the other 
beliefs of modem men and is to be replaced by 
some religious message more consonant with modern 
thinking. We can see on all sides tendencies which 
promise the fulfillment of this prophecy. We do 
well, therefore, to raise the question frankly whether 
the modern man's attitude towards evangelical 
Christianity must be essentially skeptical and nega- 
tive, and whether the gospel can be truly a force in 
our modem world. 

The situation is as critical for the church as for 
the modern world. Unless the gospel can control the 
formative men of to-day, it will require more than 
one generation to regain the ground Christianity will 
lose. The gospel, it is true, will remain the posses- 
sion of the theologically simple minded; it will 
continue to furnish the individualistic morality of our 
common life; but it will not keep men and women 
who have come under the influence of the truly 
modern world from pessimism, moral indifference, 
and the practice and philosophy of force. The 



THE GOSPEL OF THE NEW TESTAMENT J 

church needs these formative lives. Society needs 
them even more. Evangelized leaders are as indis- 
pensable as evangelized masses. If without their 
influence the church will grow intellectually and 
socially flaccid, without their power to infuse the 
gospel into social transformation society will grow 
materialistic. For a man, even though he be rich 
and learned and formative, needs to be saved. And a 
social order, even though it build transcontinental 
railroads and turn its forests into books, needs to 
be made the kingdom of God. 

I 

At the very outset of our discussion we are con- 
fronted by the question of method. Where shall the 
gospel be found? Modem Christianity as a re- 
ligion is an historically developed system of doctrines, 
each the product of a particular period. Far more 
than the non-technical student of our religion is 
aware, this body of dogma is the common property 
of all Christendom. It is embodied in the various 
symbols of Protestantism, but Protestants gained 
it from the Roman church; the Roman church and 
the Greek church as well drew it from those ecu- 
menical councils which recall not only the world- 
wide controversies they sought to settle, but also the 



4 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

time when all Christians were at one except as they 
were heretics or schismatics. 

Although ecumenical theology is derived from scrip- 
tural teachings, it need only be read in the creeds 
of Constantinople and Chalcedon to be recognized 
as something different from the gospel of the New 
Testament. Every word of the creedal sentences is 
a shibboleth intended to separate some independent 
thinker or school of thinkers from the Catholic church. 
But is this Christianity the religion of Christ ? And 
is it to be the starting point of that theological recon- 
struction we are all but unanimously agreed must be 
undertaken if our rapidly growing educated class is to 
be kept loyal to the church? No questions are dis- 
cussed more earnestly or with more learning. And 
the more we know of what might be called the 
natural history of this Christianity of ecclesiastical 
authority, the more are we convinced that it is the 
descendant of a numerous ancestry of which the 
gospel of the New Testament is only one member. 
In our inherited corpus of doctrine we Can see the sur- 
vivals of Greek philosophy, Roman distrust of logical 
thoroughness, the rites and mysteries of an orien- 
talized Graeco-Roman world, mediaeval politics, and 
even the traces of Indian theosophy and asceticism. 

This is not to say that such eclecticism and solidifi- 



THE GOSPEL OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 5 

cation of religious survivals into a religion nucleated 
around the gospel could have been avoided, or that 
on the whole it is to be lamented. For my part I can- 
not see how the gospel ever could have become the 
religion of a Hellenized civilization without being 
clothed in Greek concepts. Nor could it have become 
a power in the mediaeval world except it had been ex- 
pressed in mediaeval terms and methods. The only 
thing that need here concern us beyond the undeni- 
able fact that dogma has a pedigree is the question as 
to whether such a theological system shall be our 
point of departure. In a search for the method by 
which the gospel can be made more influential in our 
modem world, shall we recast inherited beliefs, or 
shall we begin with the New Testament itself, and, 
as it were, repeat in our own day the process by which 
the gospel has always been brought into intellectual 
harmony and expression in earlier periods ? 

I have no hesitation in declaring for the second 
alternative. 

The study of the history of doctrine is illuminating 
if a man would gain a conception of the actual situa- 
tion created by orthodoxy to which he must adjust 
his own message. It is helpful in developing religious 
interest and theological balance ; it is indispensable 
as indicating the process by which we may bring 



6 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

the gospel to our modern life. But it is not a point 
of departure for theological reconstruction. The great 
demand to-day is not for a manipulation of our inher- 
ited theology into some form more acceptable to our 
modern ways of thinking. It is rather for a frank 
disregard of inherited dogma except by way of his- 
torical evaluation and a return to the primitive 
gospel itself ; to the gospel that founded Christianity, 
conquered the Roman Empire, and embodies the 
continuous realities of the spiritual life. True, 
the apperceptive mass of doctrine — if the expression 
may be pardoned — is one element in the situation 
to which the gospel must be presented in that it 
affects the method of presentation, and suggests 
caution in adopting a radical program of illumina- 
tion. But this mass of doctrine does not constitute 
in itself the substance of a truly spiritual Christianity. 
A sense of the truth of this assertion is the real cause of 
the widespread demand to "go back to Christ," or, 
rather, to bring Christ back to us. Inherited ortho- 
doxy is so colored by outgrown philosophies, pre- 
scientific conceptions, outgrown political ideals and 
prejudices, as to be unusable by many an earnest man 
and woman. To remodel the old house is more 
expensive than to tear it down and use such materials 
of it as are sound in erecting a new building. 



THE GOSPEL OF THE NEW TESTAMENT f 

Here is one characteristic of a positive, evangelical 
theology : it uses the material which theologies of the 
past have employed. It would throw away nothing 
which its analysis of the doctrinal development may 
discover to be more than concepts used to interpret 
eternal realities to a given age. But it starts with 
the strictly evangelic data which have been worked 
into the corpus of doctrine, rather than with that 
corpus itself. It would use the bits of glass of the 
mosaic figure, but it would not seek above all to 
preserve the figure. 

II 

What then is that gospel of the New Testament 
which we would bring to our modem world? 

Sometimes we speak of it as if it were the Sermon 
on the Mount, or some philosophy of religion, or some 
general message about deliverance in Heaven. 
There is truth in each of these conceptions, for each 
embodies some aspect or implication of the gospel; 
but the definition which we seek is not in any of them. 
If we would formulate the gospel with precision, we 
must place ourselves back at the moment when 
Christianity was first preached as a distinctive mes- 
sage. Our method must be historical, not dog- 
matic. 

I. In the Synoptic Gospels we find the gospel as 



8 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

first announced, a message of the approaching ful- 
fillment of a religious-social hope — the establish- 
ment of God's own kingdom through one whom 
God had appointed and empowered for the task. 
John the Baptist did not undertake to define what 
was meant by Christ or the kingdom or the Day of 
Judgment. He appealed to the definite expectations 
of those to whom he spoke. His emphasis was not 
laid upon a new doctrine, but on the fulfillment of the 
noblest hope of Judaism. God was about to act. 
The Judge was at the doors. The Christ, although 
they did not know him, was already in the midst of the 
people whom he would deliver. To prepare them- 
selves for his Day and his new kingdom, men had 
only to repent, be baptized, and live a life of social 
helpfulness. 

When Jesus took up the work which John was 
forced to abandon, he began with the same message : 
The kingdom of God is at hand. Men were to 
believe that message. But while with John the 
expectation was centered on the Day of Judgment 
with which the kingdom was to be inaugurated, with 
Jesus it was centered upon the deliverance which was 
to be accomplished. It was good news — the gospel. 
Therein he changed a negative to a positive hope. 

Jesus was, however, not content to announce that 



THE GOSPEL OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 9 

the prayer for national deliverance was about to be 
answered. He knew that God's deliverance could 
not be national and ethnic, but was to be personal and 
social. The kingdom which God was to establish 
could be enjoyed only by those who were like its 
King. Thus there grew up his exposition of himself 
as the Son of Man, the embodiment of the ideal life, 
and the proclamation of the conditions under which 
this life is to be lived in an evil world. 

Four joyous truths combined to make the message 
which he delivered ; God can be trusted as a Father 
to save his children from Satan, sin, and death; 
the kingdom of God is a certain and supreme good for 
those who seek forgiveness of the Father ; eternal life 
is a life of love, in quality like that of God ; and this 
divine life is revealed in Jesus himself, as a forgiving 
ministry of love to others, even though that ministry 
brings loss and death. 

It is difficult to say which of these four elements is 
the more important, but as the substance of an evan- 
gelical message the last was the more characteristic of 
the religion which Jesus inaugurated. The original 
gospel of Jesus was the product of a life-process — 
the self-revelation of its author. He was living 
the life of the Spirit. Distressed by circumstance 
though he was, he was the type of that kingdom 



lO THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

which was to come. His teachings were not the 
result of speculation but of experience. To be- 
lieve his teaching as to the Fatherliness of God, 
the supremacy of righteousness, faith, and love, was 
to listen to exposition of the supreme values of life 
by one who was able to make them supreme in his 
own living. For a man to make them controlling in 
one's own life was to be morally like Jesus, possessed 
like him of a joyous, emancipating trust in the Father 
and a self-sacrificing love for men. As Jesus him- 
self declared, it was to be perfect like God. The 
sense of union which Jesus had with God was the 
source of the Truth which was to be men's Way to 
Life. Whether or not they used the term, when men 
believed this they believed that Jesus was indeed the 
Messiah. 

The program, if we may use such a term, in which 
Jesus set forth this spiritual deliverance born of a 
unique experience of God was to a considerable ex- 
tent the messianic hope of the Pharisees, but that 
program is never obtrusive in his teaching. The 
early Christians attributed to him certain messianic 
expressions which he himself probably never used, 
at least in the precise form in which they stand in the 
New Testament and in the other early Christian 
writings; but it is not difficult for a thoroughly 



THE GOSPEL OF THE NEW TESTAMENT II 

objective criticism to dissociate such words from 
those which were really his. Apocalyptic his teach- 
ings indubitably were, but it is possible to dis- 
tort and overemphasize the importance of this ele- 
ment. The kingdom of God was still future, but he, 
its founder and herald, was present and its spiritual 
life could be lived in untoward surroundings if men 
only dared. If he expected the kingdom would be 
established by catastrophe — and after all legitimate 
allowance is made for apostolic coloring in the reports 
of his words it is not improbable that this was in his 
expectations — such a catastrophe was not central 
in his teachings. Indeed it all but disappears before 
an impartial criticism of the sources. He looked 
across the chasm that separated the two ages recog- 
nized by current messianism, and centered the thought 
of his followers on the present forgiving love of God, 
the new social order the Father would establish, 
the freedom, the love, the joyousness by which it was 
to be characterized. This new sort of life, the Age- or 
eternal-life, he embodied and sought so to describe 
that his followers might seek and gain it. The escha- 
tological pictures which we find in Jewish literature, 
like the Book of Enoch and the other apocalypses, 
were not the content, but the clothing of his message. 
They might all be omitted and his teaching would 



12 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

still be the richest of all the sages. To change the 
figure, they were the point of contact, or rather the 
point of departure, of his teaching. 

But one thing cannot be overlooked by any un- 
prejudiced interpreter : Jesus believed that he was the 
Christ. Not the Christ in the strictly Jewish sense 
that in the future he would establish Judaism and 
judge the nations, but in the deeper sense that he saw 
himself embodying the very heart of a redemptive, 
regenerating God. The spirit of the Lord was upon 
him, empowering him to minister to the needs of those 
who needed divine assistance and to save those who 
needed to be delivered from Satan, sin, and death. 

2. When one passes from the teaching of Jesus to 
that of the apostles, he is conscious of a change of 
atmosphere. That which was secondary or implicit in 
the teaching of Jesus becomes prominent with Peter 
and Paul. Jesus was Christ the Lord. That was 
the simple creed of the first Christians, grounded not 
only on their acquaintance with Jesus, but on their 
experience of the Spirit, and primarily upon Jesus' 
character, power, and resurrection from the dead. 
Once having recognized in him this messianic value, 
like true children of their time they forecast his 
future in its light. His earthly life became of less im- 
portance as they compared it with the future. Its 



THE GOSPEL OF THE l^W TESTAMENT 1 3 

supreme humiliation was not that merely of poverty, 
defeat, and death. It was also the humiliation of a 
heavenly being who humbled himself to be a man 
and sufferer. Yet even thus he had been the one 
who was to deliver Israel. Although his real mes- 
sianic work was yet in the future, it was daily drawing 
nearer. At any moment they believed the trumpet 
might sound, the dead rise from Sheol, the Judgment 
Seat be established, the New Jerusalem descend from 
Heaven, the Christ conquer his enemies, and his 
church be called to an eternity of bliss. Because 
they believed him to be thus superhuman, they 
worshiped him as the Lord of their lives and their 
future. Their gospel thus did not center about a 
dead, defeated Jesus, but about the triumphant, 
triumph-sharing Christ. It was a message not of the 
finality of suffering and self-repression, but of the su- 
premacy of the spiritual surplus of the Christlike life. 
For those who look at the central rather than the 
outer elements of the thought of both Jesus and Paul, 
there is no divergence sufficient to break an essential 
imity in this elaboration of the gospel. To both 
alike it is a message of a personal and social salvation 
revealed and wrought through Jesus by God. If 
we analyze Paul's message as it appears or is involved 
in his writings, the messianic work which was to be 



14 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

accomplished by Jesus the Christ was the same as that 
expected by all the early Christians, a divine deliver- 
ance from the same three great and terrible enemies 
we find in the teaching of Jesus: from Satan, who 
had established his kingdom in the world and who 
was bringing misery of all sorts upon men, both 
bad and good alike; from Sin, that half -personified 
principle which held humanity in its power because 
humanity began in sinful Adam, and which no man 
could escape because all men were *' carnal"; and 
from death, the horror of which ran throughout all 
Jewish life. 

This message of deliverance involved many subor- 
dinate matters. Time was divided into two ages : the 
first, in which the Prince of Evil reigned, and the 
followers of Christ were to expect sorrow ; the second 
the Age which was to come in which Christ would 
establish the kingdom of God — an age in which 
the wicked were to suffer and the righteous were to be 
happy. This new age was to be ushered in by the 
Day of Judgment. The writers of the Jewish apoca- 
lypses described this awful day in detail and it was no 
less real to the early church. But with this difference : 
the apostles, like Jesus, made the basis of eternal 
destinies then to be fixed, not one of Jewish or Gentile 
birth, but rather the actual possession of the sort of 



THE GOSPEL OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 1 5 

life which could make membership in the kingdom 
possible. With the Christian the message of the 
judgment was fundamentally a message of deliver- 
ance by transformation of the individual by God's 
Spirit into the likeness of Jesus. The man who had 
accepted Jesus as Christ and had consequently 
received the spirit of Christ into his soul awaited 
calmly this day of terror to others. He was already 
acquitted. The Judge was his Savior, in whom he 
trusted. Death would separate him from the flesh, 
the agent of sin, and the resurrection was to save him 
from both Satan and death. The certainty of this 
triumph was assured by the incontestable experience 
bom of faith in the goodness of God, and by the 
historic fact that the Jesus who had embodied this 
life of the Spirit had shown the way to the divine 
threefold deliverance. 

It is only a hasty estimate that fails to see that the 
deliverance thus foretold by both Jesus and Paul is 
positive rather than negative, ethical rather than 
magical. Although in its complete sense it was yet 
future, germinantly it was already a present posses- 
sion. Salvation did not mechanically come to a 
man ; he waited, a new creation, for the coming king- 
dom. Satan might buffet, but Satan could bring 
only temporary sorrow; his age was about to end. 



1 6 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

Death might come, but death had been overcome; 
those who possessed the spirit of the God who had 
raised Christ from the dead, already possessed an 
eternal life like that of Jesus. An evil age might bring 
Christians suffering, but their Master had overcome 
the age. His followers, living as best they could a 
life like that of their great King, could well endure 
the miseries of an evil age. They, if not their present 
comfort, were safe. 

3. At this point, however, we confront a question 
which has been elevated into great prominence in 
recent New Testament study. It is the very simple 
question as to whether there is more than one gospel 
in the New Testament. Or, to put it more specific- 
ally, did Jesus give us the gospel and did Paul give 
us a new religion — Christianity ? Such a question 
will seem to many a man as irrelevant, if not worse. 
Orthodox Christianity in its formulation did not 
recognize the methods of modern Biblical theology. 
It started with the Bible rather than the distinctive 
messages of the various writers of the Bible ; least of 
all did it distinguish between those of Jesus and 
Paul. Any examination of theological treatises 
will show that their writers have never hesitated to 
combine any sentences from different parts of the 
Bible which seem in any way to agree, and on the 



THE GOSPEL OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 1 7 

basis of their combined teaching to formulate dog- 
mas. In this way there has grown up a Christian 
theology based upon an uncritical combination of 
material. In cases where such material has not 
been readily combined the inconsistencies of various 
texts have been evaded or removed by exegetical 
ingenuity ranging from the allegories of the early 
church Fathers to the formulations of councils. 

It is a characteristic of our modem study, however, 
that it treats the Bible analytically. Instead of 
treating it as an integral book, it compares the 
teachings of its different authors and attempts to 
point out similarities and differences in their develop- 
ment. In the case of Jesus and Paul it was very 
natural that this should at first tend to magnify the 
differences between the simple, unphilosophical, 
joyously creative religious message of Jesus and the 
elaborated systemizations of Paul. With some 
interpreters such differences become the controlling 
factors in interpretation. In their opinion Paul in 
comparison with Jesus is an absolutely new phenome- 
non. His theology is not determined by a picture of 
Jesus' life and in it we can find little of the gospel 
which Jesus taught. *' That which was everything to 
Paul was nothing to Jesus." In Jesus we have a call 
to men to submit their souls to God and His will. 



1 8 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

In Paul whoever believes in the incarnation, death, 
and resurrection of Jesus as a Divine Being can 
obtain salvation. Even in the case of less radical 
scholars a pronounced difference is found between the 
Master and the apostle, — a difference between "the 
voluntary and immediate apprehension of God's 
love in childlike confidence, and the belief that man 
may venture to approach God, because God Him- 
self has offered the necessary sacrifice upon the cross 
of Christ." 

The extent to which the self-consciousness of Jesus 
varies from the interpretation placed upon him by 
Paul must be considered later. At this point it is 
necessary only to consider the main question already 
raised as to whether there are two gospels. The 
reply to this is immediate in the words of Paul to the 
Galatians: "There is no gospel of any other sort or 
kind." The contrast between the teaching of Jesus 
and that of Paul is, of course, apparent to every reader 
of the New Testament, but it is not a difference in 
fundamental character. It consists rather in the 
case of Paul of the exposition of the significance of 
the person of Jesus and of the salvation wrought by 
him in terms that made it applicable and tenable 
among the Christians of his own day. The champions 
of the view that sharply distinguish Paulinism from 



THE GOSPEL OF THE NEW TESTAMENT I9 

the message of Jesus have failed to distinguish between 
two processes in the apostle's preaching, — the evan- 
gelistic, which we find set forth in the Book of Acts, 
the historicity of which is daily becoming increasingly 
recognized; and the educational, directed to those 
who have already accepted Jesus as Christ and 
who need to be taught loyalty to their new spiritual 
experience. Paul certainly was far more informed 
as to the historical Jesus than those who insist upon 
his fundamental divergence from his Master are 
ready to admit. But his great effort in writing to 
Christians was not to do that which such Ministers 
of the Word as Mark were capable of doing, but rather 
to apply the gospel to the exigencies of the human 
experience, and to defend it from the attacks of those 
who sought to ingulf it in Judaism or some gnostic 
speculation. The difference between Jesus and 
Paul at this point is that between the formulation of 
the imperatives of religious faith and the theology of 
religious experience. In so far as the theologians of 
the schools have been swayed by the perception of the 
fundamental identities which bind together these two 
stages of religious teaching, they have been justified 
in combining the material that has come from Jesus 
and from Paul. 

Nor is it possible to rule out of court this funda- 



20 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

mental agreement in the redemption messages of Paul 
and of Jesus by asserting that the Synoptic Gospels 
as they stand to-day are the products of Paulinism. 
Such a method is altogether too easy and too a priori. 
To say that whenever the Jesus of the Synoptics and 
the Jesus of Paul agree it is because the writers of 
these early gospels have been influenced by Paul is a 
begging of the question as naive as is alleged by 
some to be found in traditional orthodoxy itself. The 
central message of Jesus is the central message of 
Paul, however much the apostle may have elabo- 
rated and adjusted that message to local needs. 

But we may go one step farther. Such an elabora- 
tion of the systematic relations of the gospel as Paul 
has given was imperatively demanded by the exi- 
gencies of thought itself. No man is able to leave 
religion uncorrected with his experience. There 
are too many fundamental questions that he must 
answer. And unless the thinking of the centuries 
has been incredibly artificial, the questions which Paul 
raised concerning the relation of God's deliverance as 
revealed in and accomplished by J6sus with such 
problems as its dependence on Judaism, death, human 
history, the moral order of the universe, and the 
future of the individual, to say nothing of its rela- 
tion to moral construction, are precisely those which 



THE GOSPEL OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 21 

a man of any epoch must face and answer. And in 
answering such questions he will inevitably follow 
the same method as that adopted by Paul himself. 
He will answer them in view of the person, the ideal- 
ism, the death and the resurrection of Jesus, and in 
the terms of his own age. 

4. One point, however, still remains to be con- 
sidered. It is that to which we must repeatedly 
recur, namely, the relative importance of the appara- 
tus by which Paul and, to some extent, Jesus himself 
set forth the significance of the gospel : that is to 
say, the forms of thought furnished by the apocalyptic 
thought of New Testament times. 

Here again we must postpone any complete dis- 
cussion, but in view of present tendencies it should 
be said that every interpreter must give large latitude 
to his treatment of all apocalyptic forecasts. The 
modern man has little of that instinctive sympathy 
with symbolism which pervades early Christian 
thought. The apocalypse, like prophecy, is essen- 
tially poetic. It is a lamentable exegetical method 
that sees in its pictures any attempt at scientific accu- 
racy. It is, of course, a fair question as to just how far 
the authors, and particularly the first readers, of these 
apocalypses regarded them as figurative, for a dis- 
tinction between the literal and the pictorial is always 



22 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

hard to draw in Jewish thought. The genius 
of Hebraism was unanalytic, with a constant tend- 
ency toward solidifying qualities into quantities, 
just as the Greek thought was constantly tending to 
abstract general conceptions from concrete experience. 
The Hebrew language, for instance, lacks adjectives ; 
nouns must serve in their place. Figures of speech, 
even of the most abstract sort, steadily tended toward 
personification. The word and the wisdom of 
Jehovah became subordinate mediators between 
him and his world. Yet on the other hand, concrete 
realities were constantly used in relations which 
show that their use was symbolic. Isaiah represents 
an angel as bringing a hot coal from the altar, 
placing it upon the prophet's tongue, and then bidding 
him to speak. It is impossible and absurd to place 
many of the pictures of the messianic age in precise 
scientific categories. Just as the rabbis, looking back, 
described the Golden Age of pharisaism under Alex- 
andra as the time when a grain of wheat was as large 
as a kidney, did the apocalyptists describe the vine- 
yards of the messianic age as producing bunches of 
grapes yielding hogsheads of wine. No Jew would 
be deceived by such figures. They would symbolize 
to him the boundless fertility of the soil under the 
blessings of Jehovah. So even more clearly in the 



THE GOSPEL OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 23 

case of such figures as we find in the Book of Daniel, 
the Enoch literature, and the Apocalypse of John. 
Symbolism is there self-evident. 

For these reasons the modern interpreter must be 
slow to apply too rigorous methods to the apocalyp- 
tic hopes of the early Christian. On the one hand 
he cannot draw the line with precision between that 
which is to be taken literally and that which is to be 
taken figuratively, but on the other hand he cannot 
safely say that symbolism is not present in all apocalyp- 
tic figures. He must not overestimate the tendency 
towards realism. To Jew and early Christian alike 
the reality which these apocalypses contained was 
more than that of the picture themselves. There is 
symbolism in the cubical shape of the heavenly 
Jerusalem and in the Son of man coming in the 
clouds as truly as in the beast and his mark. 

But eschatology must not be banished with its 
pictures. Any interpretation in a truly historical 
spirit will seek to recover that contained within 
them, no matter how literally they may have been 
taken by certain interpreters, for eschatology, as 
will presently appear, is part of the content of the 
gospel. In thus interpreting apocalyptic imagery 
the student will be simply following the indications 
of the writers themselves who bid those who "read, 



24 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

understand." And, as will appear later, not the least 
important among the hopes contained in eschatologi- 
cal programs is that of a social order, which though 
not to come by observation or effort, would be no 
less real because it was to be introduced by God. 

III 

This message of a divinely accomplished deliver- 
ance preached by the founders of the church claims 
to be based on historical facts. That is evident on 
every page of the New Testament. But this is alto- 
gether too general a statement. To be precise 
we must recognize that the gospel is historical in two 
senses ; in that it is, first, a record of experiences, and, 
second, an interpretation of that experience in ac- 
cordance with the concepts of a definite historical 
period. 

I. In the first place, the gospel is identified with 
definite historical experiences. Primarily, of course, 
these experiences are those of the historical Jesus of 
Nazareth. I do not raise the question as to whether 
every detail in the New Testament accounts is sus- 
ceptible of confirmation, nor the larger question as 
to whether all those deeds and words attributed to 
him by Christian centuries are genuinely his. But 
this I would emphasize : the gospel as it stands in the 

/ 



THE GOSPEL OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 25 

New Testament and as understood by Christians of 
the pre-theological age includes a narrative of events. 
Although Paul is not primarily interested in history 
as such, we find him repeatedly referring to the life, 
humiliation, death, resurrection, of Jesus. Once he 
expressly states these historical facts as constituting 
a part of the gospel he preached. If possible even 
more strenuously does an early Christian writer 
like Ignatius insist upon the reality of the person 
and the experiences of the crucified and risen Jesus. 
And it is this concrete message as to Jesus together 
with its implications for the spiritual life that has 
constituted the substance of evangelicalism through- 
out all the ages. The Christ was something more 
than a "principle," something more than Truth. 
He was a genuine person sharing in the course of 
history but rising above the natural order that 
had apparently crushed him, and sharing his 
triumph with all those who share his spirit. 

Similarly, the gospel of the New Testament em- 
bodies the experience of the first Christians. Prima- 
rily, such experience began with the acceptance of 
Jesus as teacher, healer, prophet, and the Christ of 
the coming kingdom. But their real enthusiasm 
and evangelistic impulse was connected with their 
belief in the resurrection of Jesus. They had seen 



26 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

him, heard him, and, if the gospels in their present 
form are to be trusted, had put their hands upon him. 
As to the nature of this experience of the risen Jesus 
we shall presently inquire, but that it is an integral 
part of the first preaching of the gospel there can be, 
and is, no serious doubt. 

But Christian experience as related in the New 
Testament included also the ''gifts" and the "fruit" 
of the Holy Spirit. Whatever psychological character 
we may ascribe to such experience it is obvious that 
it formed a part of the original gospel message. The 
promise of the Holy Spirit was to all those who ac- 
cepted the testimony of the new evangelists and 
believed on Jesus as the Messiah. The power of 
God was announced as present in human lives, not 
only as the assurance of an eschatological salvation, 
inestimably precious as that was, but also as the 
source of ability to work cures, make converts, and 
grow morally strong in the spiritual life. In the 
first defense of the new faith three arguments were 
uppermost: the actual resurrection of Jesus, the 
coming of the Spirit of God into the believer's life, 
and the fulfillment of messianic prophecy. It is 
obvious that the first two of these apologetic ele- 
ments are in the region of history. 

2. In the second place, the gospel is historical in 



THE GOSPEL OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 27 

that the concept by which the experience and person 
of Jesus were interpreted and evaluated was itself the 
product of historical forces. 

We know Jesus as a definite historical person only 
as he lives for us in the records of the faith of his 
earliest disciples. The gospel therefore is not simply 
a record of the experiences of Jesus ; it is a message of 
the redemptive value of these experiences as formu- 
lated by those who had experienced the redemption. 
That is one reason why Jesus is so real. He has been 
worked into the very life of history. Now in the 
faith of these disciples Jesus had a meaning and an 
office. He was the Christ ; that is, — and the defini- 
tion is fundamental, — the one whom God Himself 
empowered by His own resident spirit to save His 
people by establishing them as His kingdom. 

It was impossible for these conceptions, in which 
were expressed the power and significance of Jesus, 
to have been other than creatures of an historical 
situation. Experiences which become the substance 
of any preaching are always expressed in terms and 
thought-forms derived from the social mind in which 
those who formulate it shared. How could it be 
otherwise in the case of Jesus? We should not 
expect the Grecian world, of its own accord, to have 
thought of him as the Messiah. The Greeks did not 



28 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

have any messianic concept to employ. That came 
from Judaism. 

This Jewish social mind itself was the product of a 
long historical process and embraced distinct ele- 
ments each of which came over from the past. 

First of all the messianic hope which furnished the 
messianic interpretation itself was the outcome of a 
long development. Some of its elements are to be 
traced even to Babylon. It involved much more 
than the use of a single term. It was a world-view 
which extended from creation in the past to and into 
a new Age that was to come. Not that the New 
Testament writers explicitly distinguish between 
their interpretation and the facts they interpret. As 
has already been implied, to the early Christian the 
acquittal at the Day of Judgment was as real an 
element of the gospel as Jesus' teaching about the 
Fatherliness of God, or his resurrection, or his sinless- 
ness. Apparently Paul was as much convinced of 
the present kingdom of Satan as he was of the coming 
kingdom of God. The gospel in fact involved a 
dualism that forced upon nascent orthodoxy its 
first philosophical problem, namely, how a good 
God could be incarnate in an evil world, and thus 
compelled it to combat gnosticism. 

Then, too, deep in the evangelic message we can see 



THE GOSPEL OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 29 

embodied theological conceptions bom of that social 
experience which always finds expression in the re- 
ligious thinking of an age. The Jewish social mind 
had two final thought-forms in religion, — monarchy 
and parenthood. The Jew of the first century could 
think of no higher analogy of divine power than the 
kingdom of that awful emperor who sat enthroned 
upon the Palatine. Religion, so far as it dealt with 
relations between man and God, was inevitably 
expressed in monarchical terms. If God were the 
king, men were his subjects, either rebellious and to 
be punished, or loyal and to be rewarded. The test 
and measure of their relations was the divine law. 
The gospel in the New Testament presupposes this 
theology. The human race had broken God's law. 
The Sovereign of the Universe had nothing before 
Him, therefore, but to punish, unless He chose in His 
grace to forgive. Thus there arose that extension of 
the monarchical conception of religion to be met in 
the thought of Paul. But Paul did not originate the 
idea of justification and an atonement in which the 
messianic king suffered for his subjects. Both 
analogies were drawn from the political practice 
and were already operative in the religious thought 
of his times. 

Similarly in the case of the parental analogy. 



30 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

The heavenly Father, in the teaching of Jesus and of 
Paul, has dignity as well as graciousness. In the 
ancient family the father had rights and the children 
had duties, and these reciprocal relations were not 
affected by the father's waiving of his rights. He 
could forgive only because he might punish. Sever- 
ity and love were similarly involved in the family 
government of God. 

Another institution which became an integral part 
of the original gospel message was that of sacrifice. 
The interpretation of the death of Christ as a sacrifice 
was thrust upon the early Christian by the religious 
practice of the entire world of New Testament times. 
Among Jews and Greeks alike no man came to 
a sense of reconciliation with his god without com- 
pleting the reconciling process in the dramatic act 
of the sacrifice. The doctrine of the atonement, it is 
true, was not at the start formally drawn from the 
sacrificial analogy. As long as the institution 
actually continued, it was enough merely to speak of 
that death in terms of the altar. The rationalizing of 
the death of Christ in the first thousand years of 
Christian thought proceeded along the line of the 
monarchical conception. Jesus, so teachers like 
Origen asserted, gave himself as a ransom to Satan 
that he might thus release those of his subjects whom 



THE GOSPEL OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 3 1 

Satan held in his power in Sheol. But none the less 
the death of Jesus was constantly described in terms 
of the altar, and his blood was held to be the 
archetype of the blood of bulls and goats. 

The first preaching of the gospel message also pre- 
supposed the fundamental social ideals of the 
ancient world. Equality and fraternity were terms 
of little but academic interest. So long as the king 
was autocratic, his subjects differed widely in the 
privileges they enjoyed, and these privileges ran from 
that sorry minimum enjoyed by slaves to that maxi- 
mum given to those nobles whom the emperor elected 
to be his particular friends. The gospel, it is true, 
breaks across these differences in classes by declaring 
that all social differences among subjects of the king- 
dom vanish, but such a state of equality was invari- 
ably transferred to the ideal relations of the future 
kingdom. In Christ, i.e., in the ideal social order of 
the spiritual life he was to establish, there was 
neither bond nor free; in the church there were 
slaves. In Christ there was neither male nor female ; 
in the church the woman was the weaker vessel. 

IV 

Were, then, these first Christians wholly other- 
worldly, and did their message of salvation ignore the 



32 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

needs of the very real world in which the Christian 
waited the coming of his Lord ? 

The early Christians did not recognize any call to 
save the Roman Empire or its institutions. They 
were citizens of a kingdom yet to come. Pending 
its arrival, they endured the Empire's oppressions, 
obeyed as best they could its laws, and withdrew 
as far as was practicable from its evil associations. 
They married, bought and sold, died and were buried, 
according to the customs of their neighbors. They 
would keep themselves unspotted from the world, 
but they did not attempt to save the world. They 
sought to save men and women from the world. 

Yet such statements though true are not the whole 
truth. For restrained as was the early Christian 
in the social expression of his new spiritual life 
because of his belief in the speedy return of Jesus to 
establish his transcendental kingdom, he was never- 
theless socializing ideals that were to be of the ut- 
most influence. Love and faith and sexual purity 
are positive forces in any society. Even more potent 
is the belief in God's working in the community of 
those who worship Him and endeavor to grow like 
Jesus in daily life. The kingdom of God as a social 
ideal among the early Christians was eschatological, 
but as among the Jews it was none the less social. 



THE GOSPEL OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 33 

To question this would be utterly to misinterpret the 
gospel on the one hand and the social influences 
of Christianity on the other. 

The makers of our great theologies — and all Chris- 
tendom is one at this point — have built many of these 
apocalyptic eschatological hopes into the structure of 
historical orthodoxy. To hold all of them in strenu- 
ous literalness, however, has been characteristic of 
but few groups of Christians. From the days of the 
Montanist there has been a tendency to treat the 
eschatological elements of the gospel as figures of 
speech, to refer them wholly to the distant future, or 
to ignore them. Chiliasm, or, as we more commonly 
call it to-day, millennarianism, has always been re- 
jected as a controlling element in authoritative 
dogma. But it has always been a disturbing factor 
in the history of the church ; and naturally, for it is 
clearly enough an integral element of the first preach- 
ing of the gospel. Indeed, from one point it might 
almost be said that the history of dogma has been in 
no small degree the history of a struggle between that 
Christian teaching which made eschatology its con- 
trolling factor and that Christian theology which 
gave preeminence to contemporary philosophy. 
Every great theologian has been forced in some way 
to adjust the apocalyptic eschatological element of the 



34 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

gospel to the perspective of the essential evangelic 
message which he brought to his age. The modern 
man of to-day, just as truly as the modern man of 
the third or the fifth or the sixteenth century, must 
needs face the problem for himself. But he must do 
this methodically, appreciatively, sympathetically, 
and not arrogantly or subjectively. 



CHAPTER II 

THE MODERN MAN 

The world we live in is obviously very different 
from that of the apostles, and the presuppositions of 
our thinking are vastly different from theirs. Indeed, 
it would be difficult to overestimate the contrasts 
between the age of the New Testament and our own 
as far as the fundamental attitudes of the social mind 
are concerned. In the outer forms of life there are, 
it is true, many points of similarity. It would be 
difficult to find a more modern period in history than 
the first Christian century. Barring their inability 
to apply steam and electricity to industry, — an ex- 
ception of incalculable importance, — the men of the 
first century of the Roman Empire were much like the 
men of to-day. They had their great business cor- 
porations, their art, their literature, their professions, 
their universities, their "new women," their athletics. 
Indeed, we learn that at Carthage students were dis- 
orderly in lectures, that at Rome they failed to pay 
their fees, and that at Alexandria professional 
athletes were maintained through something closely 

35 



36 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

resembling that ingenious device of to-day, the train- 
ing table. It is true the ancient world did not have 
football, but it had gladiatorial sports as a tolerable 
substitute. 

I 

But over against these similarities are at least four 
fundamental differences : — 

I. The modern age is primarily scientific and 
controlled by the conception of process. 

It is difficult for us to appreciate what scientific 
thought must have been in a world that believed its 
universe consisted of a flat earth around which the 
waters flowed, with several heavens superimposed, 
and with a great pit beneath in which was the abode 
of the dead. There was considerable knowledge 
in ancient culture of the movements of the heavenly 
bodies, but all religious thought was affected by this 
primitive conception of the universe. It was not 
difficult, for instance, for the early church to believe 
that all men by looking upward at the same moment 
could see the Son of man coming in the clouds. To- 
day we do not know just when we are looking up and 
when we are looking down, and such a united vision of 
an appearance in the heavens is physically unthink- 
able, except on the part of those theologians who 
give us to understand that at the second coming of 



THE MODERN MAN 2>1 

Christ, God will probably enable men to have a new 
method of sight. 

A striking illustration of its fundamentally different 
attitude toward nature is to be seen in medical 
practice. In surgery, it is true, the ancient world had 
acquired great facility, as is evidenced not only by re- 
ports of very difficult operations, but also by the col- 
lection of surgical instruments from Pompeii pre- 
served in the museum at Naples. But in dealing 
with disease equal progress had not been made. 
It has always been easier for men to mend a broken 
bone than to cure a cold. This difficulty was met 
by the Jews in a very simple fashion. They laid 
disease upon Satan. He sent miseries upon the 
world, and minor devils into people. If a man was 
crazy, he was possessed of a devil. If he had boils, 
he had devils. If a woman was bent over by some 
disease, she had been bound by Satan. Indeed, 
devils might be said to have been the bacilli of the 
ancient world. The way to cure a man was to find 
some way to induce the devils to leave him. Some- 
times this was done by conjuring the devil into a 
certain plant, and then attaching the plant to the tail 
of a dog, and then forcibly inducing the dog to pull it 
up. Sometimes it was done by giving a dose so 
nasty that the devil could not abide in the same 



38 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

body with it. Sometimes it was done by using magic 
names. Such methods did not exhaust the medical 
practice of the ancient world, but they were so 
widespread as to enable us to appreciate easily the 
great difference between the age of the New Testa- 
ment and our own as regards scientific attainments. 

It is hardly necessary to call attention to those 
great differences of view of the universe and life 
which have been wrought by physical and biological 
investigations. True, the older philosophers, some- 
times in almost startling fashion, anticipated the 
general philosophy we have built upon scientific 
discoveries, but no one would deny that a new intel- 
lectual age began with the publication of Darwin's 
"Origin of Species" and the resulting supremacy of 
the theory of evolution. Thereafter men increasingly 
have thought in terms of process. 

The conception of the orderly, genetic succession of 
purposeful changes played no role in the stratum of 
society to which Judaism and the gospel appealed. 
The eclipse was more significant than the sunrise. 
In our modern world the wonder born of awe of the 
unexplored universe has all but disappeared. Our 
capacity for surprise has been ruined by the spectro- 
scope, radium, the X-ray, and the experiments of 
Professor Loeb. There is no man so bold as to 



THE MODERN MAN 39 

prophesy how deep our science with its theory of 
evolution may probe into the mysteries of existence. 
Even the ether itself is threatened. One after 
another the great secrets of the universe are being dis- 
closed, at least in the sense that we can tell the 
conditions under which certain phenomena invariably 
appear. Our ignorance of the remainder no longer 
is lightened by the appeal to devils or angels. We 
are classifying phenomena so rapidly as to be con- 
vinced that such classification means knowledge, and 
that the universe is everywhere sane and law-abiding. 
Health and disease have become matters of investi- 
gation, and in so far as they involve the problem 
of evil, they have become phases of the all-absorbing 
search for the final unity of the evolving cosmos. 

At the first glance this process appears full of con- 
tradictions. It is not steady or unbroken. It has its 
eddies and its counter currents. Progress is some- 
times more than offset by degeneracy. But degener- 
acy in turn is offset by regeneration and the great 
movement begins again although not always in the 
same quarter in which it has suffered a check. This 
fact illustrates the apparent atomistic, divisive char- 
acter of change. The world of nature as well as of 
history seems full of unrelated and, to any science 
we as yet possess, unrelatable movements and 



40 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

counter-movements. There is no such patent evo- 
lution as some enthusiasts assume. 

Yet in the face of these perplexities, the creative 
thinkers of all time have held tenaciously to a world 
of purpose and order, of unity and meaning, above 
if not within the congeries of changes. History is 
more than events in time. Only in the perception of 
ordered change can thought rise above mere observa- 
tion. And this unity compels the acceptance of itself 
despite all the protests of those who would deny it and 
allow existence to ravel out into innumerable unre- 
lated existences. History itself, whether it be of the 
realm of impersonal forces or of the realm of human 
life, compels belief in this spiritual order that gives 
coherency to all our experiences. But this compul- 
sion is due to the acceptance of the unity of process 
rather than that of states. 

Humanity belongs to both these orders. On the 
one side it is a mass of impersonal atoms and forces 
subject to chemical and physical changes. On the 
other it is possessed of identities with this spiritual 
life that it has discovered as the source of unity and 
timelessness. Its history, whether one looks at the 
individual or the race, is a progress from the pre- 
ponderance of the one to the dominance of the 
other. As living organisms men recapitulate the 



THE MODERN MAN 4I 

history of other living organisms ; as spiritual beings 
they differ from all other life. Just when the 
change from animal to animal-spiritual life occurred 
science cannot tell us with assurance. Whether 
life itself by God's will blossomed into a spiritual 
person, or whether the spiritual nature came by 
some divine creative fiat, is of no vital significance. 
Religion looks not to origins, but to destinies. It 
asks not Whence but Whither. But its answer to this 
question of questions must be in strictest conformity 
to what we know of human life and its history. 
For only thus can it come into that conformity 
with reality which the modern man demands. It, 
too, like science must recognize process. 

But religion looks forward to the outcome of that 
process and endeavors to direct mankind thither. 
Therein lies its task and its legitimacy. For the 
spiritual life is no abstraction. It is as concrete as 
humanity. To realize its powers, to define its de- 
pendence upon and superiority to merely physical life, 
to inspire and make possible its growth by bringing 
it into dynamic relations with the equally real and 
concrete Spiritual Life of the universe, this is the 
supreme function of religion. 

It is only the corollary of this conception of process 
that every approach our modern world makes to its 



42 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

problems should be through history. Nothing is 
known apart from its relations. The present is only 
one phase of a continuous process. Nothing in the 
finite world merely is; it has become and may also 
be becoming. Kjiowledge of any sort must therefore 
involve an account of the forces from which a fact 
under discussion arose or at least by which it was 
conditioned. 

This historical method is of first importance 
throughout the entire field of investigation, but in the 
region of religion it is all but revolutionary. We 
cannot as yet see just what its full effect is to be, 
but already it is a sine qua non of an understanding 
of the doctrines, rites, and institutions of all faiths. 
Under its influence the sacred literatures are studied 
in genealogical relations, and are traced to their 
beginnings far back of written histories, and the 
spiritual order that transcends the natural is seen to 
be not static but ever more self-revealing. 

Sometimes, it is true, the application of the histori- 
cal method may overreach itself and its results col- 
lapse because of their own weight. It too often mis- 
takes resemblances for genetic relations and denies, 
at least implicitly, the creative power of the free spirit- 
ual life. Such I believe is true of some of the ex- 
treme views of the origin and nature of Christianity. 



THE MODERN MAN 43 

It is impossible, for instance, for me to see the rea- 
sonableness of finding in almost every thought and 
figure of the gospel adumbrations of Babylonian 
myths of Gilgamesh. But even in this case it would 
be unallowable to let dogmatic considerations affect 
either the conclusions or the method born of the 
application of the historical point of view. Even 
if the effect of such study is to dispell some of the 
mystery that has hitherto overhung sacred things, 
even though in some instances it may have reduced 
sanctity itself to mere antiquity and have set forth 
too nakedly opposing ideas time has allowed to 
appear united, the historical method in religion has 
its positive as truly as its speculative or negative 
results. But whether friendly or hostile to current 
beliefs, it is a potent factor in the modern mind. 
For it is a correlate of process. 

2. A second and closely akin characteristic of the 
modern world is its conception of God as immanent in 
this process rather than an extra-mundane monarch. 
Sometimes it is true this belief extends over into a 
general monistic conception. Monism, however, is a 
metaphysical concept, and whatever may be its in- 
fluence in a theological ontology, in religion a man 
must be enough of a practical dualist to see that in 
the act of faith God is objective to the human spirit. 



44 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

The believer in God does not believe merely in him- 
self or in an impersonal process. Monism in itself 
can never be a basis for a theology. For in experi- 
ence we are dualists. But monistic or not, the world 
of thought in which we live cannot conceive of God 
as spatially absent from His universe any more than 
it can conceive of a living man's consciousness as 
spatially absent from his body. If, as is emphati- 
cally the case, we are involved in difficulties when- 
ever we try to think of God in terms of time and 
space, we are in vastly greater difficulties when we 
think of Him as apart from those energies which con- 
stitute that situation of which we are a part. 

Religious thinking is here at such agreement that 
it may fairly be said to have reached a stage in its 
evolution from which it will never revert. The primi- 
tive man thought of his gods in terms of primitive 
civilization and knowledge. They lived, so men 
thought, in mountains, and trees, and fountains. As 
civilization advanced men thought of God as a 
king dwelling in a celestial world from which He 
occasionally appeared to interrupt the ordinary 
course of nature, or sent His Spirit to chosen indi- 
viduals. He was not merely transcendent, he was 
external. Our modern world thinks of Him as in His 
world, expressing Himself personally, although some- 



THE MODERN MAN 45 

times in forms which superficially viewed seem im- 
personal. And if, paradoxically, just because He is 
immanent men sometimes find themselves wondering 
whether He is needed, and too often are tempted 
to force Him into inactivity under a regency of Law, 
the man of religious experience can never regard 
God as a recluse. He finds the unity presupposed 
by impersonal sciences in a spiritual order which 
speaks through himself. God must be either the 
personalized Whole or, as I am forced rather to 
believe, the Person who, as over against our own 
personalities, expresses Himself in the Whole. No 
religion can ever suffice that makes Him anything 
less than ourselves. And we are persons. 

The political and juristic conceptions of God per- 
sist in our own day, but they are no longer formative 
in constructive religious thinking. Therein is dis- 
closed an attitude of mind that distinguishes the 
modern man of our day from him of the seventeenth 
and eighteenth centuries with all his "illumination." 
The doctrine of natural rights, whether in politics or 
theology, notwithstanding its efforts to get behind the 
state, did not dislodge juristic conceptions from theol- 
ogy. On the contrary, just as in the field of politics 
it set forth the natural rights of a proletariat as over 
against the legal rights of king and noble, did it in 



46 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

the field of religion set forth the rights of a proletarian 
humanity as over against an autocratic church and 
the God of decrees. But once formulated these 
rights became, as it were, legally controlling. For this 
reason, as well as for others, the eighteenth century, 
with all its revolutions and deism, was more akin to 
the first century, even to the legalized Christianity 
of Tertullian and Augustine, than is ours. A study of 
its theologies and even of its religious negations will 
furnish some of the best criteria by which to judge 
how far removed is thought since the middle of the 
nineteenth century from the unpsychological, un- 
historical juristic religious concepts of all preceding 
centuries. Nothing can better teach one the diffi- 
culties which any positive theology must at present 
face. 

Intimately associated with this conception of God's 
personal relation with His world is the question of 
miracle. The modem man cannot conceive of any 
break in the causal, genetic process. True, he is 
ready to admit that there may be events which are not 
yet located in any of its known formulas, but in such 
a conception there is no place for that which, before 
its recent apologetic manipulation, the word miracle 
stood, — an event out of a causal series. 

If this were all that can be said, our discussion 



THE MODERN MAN 47 

might as well stop here. For the gospel cannot re- 
main the gospel in its New Testament sense and 
suffer the loss of all those events it calls *' signs" and 
*' wonders." That would conceivably mean even the 
loss of the historical Jesus himself. Yet on the other 
hand, the modem mind cannot abandon the very 
presupposition of its thinking at the behest of the 
man to whom the gospel is inseparable from the 
world-view of the first Christians. 

If, however, we once drop the debatable word 
*' miracle" and use the word "event" many difficul- 
ties vanish. No theist should object to such a change, 
for it not only clarifies the question every defender of 
Christian doctrine has attempted to answer, but it 
also clears the discussion of a mass of prejudice and 
metaphysical theology that has gathered about 
"miracle." If God be in His world, all events are 
of His will. They differ in being more or less 
classifiable. Prove that an event occurred and we 
find God there. He is as truly in the usual as in the 
unique. The modem man does not need the latter 
to justify his discovery of God in the former. What 
he does need to have shown him is that there is room 
within the universe of forces he knows for the expres- 
sion of divine personality in unique events; that the 
Spiritual Life to which he is at times so indifferent is 



48 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

free from the law of physical causality. True, the 
burden of proof grows the heavier in proportion as an 
event is unusual. But no alleged event can be regarded 
as impossible until it has been shown to be in actual 
contradiction, not to the general run of experience 
merely, but to the great generalizations which have 
been indubitably derived from nature and to the 
supreme conception of life as we find it expressed even 
in our own imperfectly free personalities. Break 
down the a priori objection born of an alleged im- 
mobility of experience and the supremacy of im- 
personal naturalism, and the question becomes one of 
testimony pure and simple. And that, too, without 
the loss of significance to the religious life. Even 
though we no longer hear His voice in the thunder, 
God is present in His cosmos — the Universal Life 
and Will and Love. And as spiritual beings men 
may speak to Him who is Spirit. 

3. If possible an even more remarkable character- 
istic of our day is the growing sense of social soli- 
darity. 

At first glance this might seem to be very similar 
to the conception of unity present in the Roman 
Empire. The Roman citizen was the Roman citizen 
everywhere, and all about the Mediterranean 
there was a developing sense of imperial unity. 



THE MODERN MAN 49 

Bound together by roads and the almost equally well- 
defined routes of the Mediterranean, the great Empire 
could everywhere express itself administratively. 
During the first century of the Empire this unity was 
of necessity largely based upon military force, but 
behind militarism there was something far more vital. 
The provinces, although not possessed of the rights 
of full citizenship, were none the less beginning to 
evolve what under more favorable circumstances 
might have become the rudiments of a representative 
government. The cities also were passing through 
an evolution of municipal equality which, though at 
the start unobservable, was to develop in the third and 
fourth centuries into something at once burdensome 
and inspiring. 

Such tendencies undoubtedly are no inconsider- 
able bond of union between the twentieth and the 
first century, but they seem almost trivial in compari- 
son with the tremendous social movement in the 
midst of which we find ourselves. The era of revolu- 
tion of the eighteenth century gave rise to a political 
equality so radical as all but to destroy the superficial 
analogies between itself and the political equality 
of the Empire under even Caracalla, Constan- 
tine, and Justinian. The Roman Empire, despite 
the provincial assembly, was ignorant of the con- 

£ 



50 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

ception of representative democracy which has ex- 
pressed itself in the constitutional monarchies and 
republics of Europe and America. It is true that in 
our political practice we are not quite sure whether 
women ought to be included under the general term 
Man, and the matter of taxes plays a considerable 
r61e in the franchise in even such a modern nation as 
Prussia. But we have no such distinction as those 
between a Roman citizen and a provincial, between 
the honestiores and the humiliores. We have abol- 
ished slavery, which was one of the recognized in- 
stitutions of human society of the olden time, and 
women are rapidly achieving industrial as well as 
political equality with men. Even the superficial 
observer of society knows that the philosophy of 
natural rights which brought about the revolutions 
and republics of the eighteenth century and the con- 
stitutional reforms of the nineteenth has long since 
passed from the political into the economic and social 
stage. The age in which we live is profoundly 
interested in non-political rights. 

It is impossible to overestimate the extent and in- 
fluence of this new social feeling. Bom as it is in 
large measure of the unconscious influence of Chris- 
tian idealism, it has spread far beyond the confines 
of the church, and indeed, unfortunately, often makes 



THE MODERN MAN 5 1 

the church itself appear unfraternal or the possession 
of an economic class. The rise of socialism is only 
one phase of a universal social consciousness which 
none of us can escape. We see ourselves no longer 
parts of a mere political unity, comparable with 
citizenship in the ancient cities. We think in terms 
of ''situations," rather than of isolated individuals, 
or even of individuals and environment. The exten- 
sion of the concepts of natural law into history 
has given us a sense of solidarity which sometimes 
even threatens our estimates of the worth of the 
individual himself. We have begun to realize that 
individualism must be social and that the word 
fraternity stands for something more than political 
liberty and equality. 

4. And, finally, another characteristic of our mod- 
em world is its refusal to accept as the basis of truth 
authority or metaphysical deduction. 

In this we are the descendants of that century 
of philosophy which began with Kant. The time 
has passed when any majority can command univer- 
sal obedience by saying, "It seems good to us and 
the Holy Ghost." We know too well how creeds were 
developed and formulated to have any great confidence 
in their finality as the expressions of spiritual realities, 
or to expect them to be understood without a knowl- 



52 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

edge of the philosophy, politics, and persecution from 
which they so largely sprang. True, the scientific 
spirit, despite its critical habit, has too often within 
it something of the old authoritative temper, and 
liberality is frequently more bigoted than the views 
which it attacks ; but none the less a pronunciamento 
must now be shown to be true, not simply "ap- 
proved." 

It is difficult to overestimate the significance of 
this habit of mind of our modern world. It has 
long since ceased to be merely academic. It shapes 
itself everywhere. You will find it in the anarchist 
and the so-called Bohemian as truly as in the man of 
the laboratory; in India and Japan as well as in 
Europe and America. Even the Roman Catholic 
turns Modernist, and the educated Mahommedan, 
rationalist. Such an emancipation brings its blessing, 
but no less truly does it bring its miseries. Who 
has not seen some soul in spiritual agony as the 
foundations built of authority totter, yet hesitating to 
trust to foundations built of rationalized experience ! 
But whether helpful or injurious, the spirit of criticism 
and liberty is here, and we cannot, even if we would, 
escape its control. The vote of the church can no 
longer make us believe that the sun moves around 
the world, and the vote of a scientific association 



THE MODERN MAN 53 

cannot make us believe that anything is true which 
denies the evidence of systematized experiment. The 
doctrine of a uniformly authoritative Bible is being 
replaced by the inspiring sense of the spiritual worth 
of the Bible as discovered through historico-literary 
criticism and the experience of the Christian com- 
munity. The modem man yields only to that he 
finds to be real. 

Here, too, we hear struck still another new note. 
The modem world believes that to be real which has 
been found by methodical procedure and which can 
be so correlated with the sane conclusions of normal 
experience and widespread induction as to make life 
richer in knowledge and the power of progressive 
self-expression. Agnosticism, though moribund as a 
philosophy, is but one phase of that exaggerated 
caution which our scientific spirit begets. Since the 
days of Kant we are slow to be too positive about 
matters which lie beyond the range of the *' practical 
reason," i.e. of experiment and methodical test. 
Empiricism has reached over into philosophy' and 
given us pragmatism. Metaphysics, like ecclesiasti- 
cal authority, has been supplemented if not replaced 
by that type of philosophy which finds its ultimates 
in values rather than in alleged axioms or intui- 
tions. 



54 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

These four basal elements of the world-view mark 
off the modern world from the world of the New 
Testament. But they do much more. They make 
it difficult if not impossible for our age to use the pre- 
suppositions that were embodied in and gave color 
to the thought of its predecessor. The difficulty 
clearly is not born of theology but of widening social 
experience and knowledge. Just as the men of the 
New Testament times could not free themselves 
from their heritage of social mind, and the men of the 
twelfth century could not break with the fascinating 
dream of imperial unity, do the men of to-day find 
themselves subject to the social mind from which 
their thoughts sprang and of which they are a part. 

II 

Who then is the "modern man''? 

I . Certainly not the man who is merely living now. 
Humanity, as you ordinarily meet it, is an interesting 
combination of survivals, many of them the ruling 
characteristics of periods long since passed. If a 
man will take the trouble really to get acquainted 
with people who are in his own social circle, he will 
find that there are representatives of every conceiv- 
able form of thinking, from that of the most advanced 
specialist in the very van of discovery to that of primi- 



THE MODERN MAN 55 

tive man. For it will not do to look for primitive 
men and women among the uncultured classes ex- 
clusively. You will find them the next time you go 
out to an afternoon tea. There is many a primitive 
man who keeps a valet, or rather whose valet keeps 
him. In point of view of the conventions he is 
infallibly well informed, but his passions, his ideas, 
his judgments of humanity, his estimate of the domi- 
nant motives of life, his standards of right and wrong, 
are those of man in the savage state. To many 
men and women civilization means simply pressed 
trousers and Paris fashions. Their outer selves are 
as charming as possible; their inner selves are rein- 
carnations of Ab, the cave man. There are plenty of 
people whose ideas are those of Genghis Khan. 
True, they do not count heads as a measure of their 
success ; but if they are men they count dollars, and 
if they are women they count hearts. That is to say, 
their primary interests are those of the marauder. 
There are other people going about their daily 
tasks with circumspection and with careful regard 
for the conventions, yet deep within themselves they 
cherish a view of the universe and of God, which to all 
intents and purposes is fetishism. They do not dare 
to say their children are well without knocking three 
times on wood, and upon no consideration would they 



56 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

walk under a ladder or sit among thirteen at table. 
So far as they live under the control of such presuppo- 
sitions they are reincarnating in our complex civiliza- 
tion the superstitions of primitive society. 

In fact it is hard for any of us to escape thinking and 
living as survivals of early ages. We still point up to 
heaven, and we still throw rice after newly married 
couples. 

2. Nor is he alone the modern man who is in 
revolt against the past. It is true that men of this 
type in appropriating the name are not altogether 
without warrant. Liberty to select his name may 
fairly be accorded any man at his philosophical 
christening. But such an appropriation of a term is 
somewhat ungenerous, in that it implies that only the 
iconoclast can claim to possess the modern spirit. 
Even if, as von Hartmann expects, the future may 
develop an attitude of mind that is genuinely pessi- 
mistic, we have not yet universally come to feel that 
the universe is the product of a supreme will that 
needs the help of humanity to get itself reunited to a 
supreme reason. It is more reasonable to regard the 
modern man as the *'free spirit" of Nietzsche, who 
would erect an entirely new ethics on the ruins of our 
modern society, and who claims already to have 
grasped a meaning of the universe which is " beyond 



THE MODERN MAN 57 

good and evil." But here again the use of the term 
is too considerably narrowed, and is made to include 
only those qualities which can appeal to a particular 
class of men out of sympathy with too many of the 
really constructive forces of to-day, and in particular 
too devoted to a materialism that denies to the super- 
human spiritual life a freedom it predicates of the 
human. We must seek a definition of wider extension. 
3. A formal definition of modernness is not diffi- 
cult. He is the modern man of any period who is 
controlled by the forces which are making To-morrow. 
In a period like that of the Maccabees he was the 
modern man who embodied the ideals which made 
the little city state of Jerusalem into the kingdom of 
John Hyrcanus. In the days of Julius Caesar he 
sympathized with the growing unity which culminated 
in the imperialism of the Antonines and the legislation 
of Justinian; in the twelfth century he championed 
the rise of the free cities; in the sixteenth century 
he was swayed by the forces born of the new learning, 
the new individualism, and the new world; in the 
eighteenth century he enforced the political conse- 
quences of the doctrine of natural rights and had a 
share in freeing thought from ecclesiastical control 
and the state from an outgrown feudalism and an 
absolute monarchy. 



58 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

The modern man of to-day is he who is controlled 
by those ideals which are transforming his inherited 
world into the newer order which his children will 
inherit. He is the child as well as the maker of To- 
morrow. That is to say, he is the man who is con- 
trolled by the four outstanding transforming charac- 
teristics of the age which have already been described. 
Such control may be conscious or unconscious, but he 
can no more help thinking of God as finding eternal 
self-expression within the universe than the Hebrew 
could think of Jehovah directing the affairs of the 
world from heaven. He thinks as instinctively 
in terms of process as the ancient world thought 
in terms of static being. He may be neither a social- 
ist nor a social reformer, but he feels the growing sense 
of brotherhood and cannot think of social relations 
in terms of insulated individualism. He may not be 
technically a scientist, but he knows that truth can- 
not be based on authority other than that of reality 
itself. 

in 

Two objections among others may be raised to this 
defijiitioa 

I. In the first place it may be said that it gives 
too little prominence to theological reconstruction. 



THE MODERN MAN 59 

Social sympathies have not always characterized 
theologians, and it is clear that if they are to be 
recognized as conditioning the acceptance of the 
gospel, new and troublesome questions will arise. 
For we must face the actual practicability of a Chris- 
tian ethic. Theology has seldom judged it necessary 
to raise such an issue. It has been content to deal 
with individual spiritual experience, the rewards and 
punishments of the future, and the clothing of some 
philosophy with scriptural expressions. 

The answer to such an objection is very simple : 
It is beside the mark. "Modem man" is not co- 
extensive with "theologian." Important as is his 
function in the religious world the theologian is 
far enough from being the controlling factor in to- 
day's religious thought, and the gospel is face to face 
with questions other than those he raises. The 
really vital religious issues are those set by the social 
order itself, and these cannot be answered by the use 
of exclusively theological methods and presupposi- 
tions, but by the test of life itself. Theology must 
be brought to see that our day's interest in meta- 
physical definition is not so intense as its interest in 
social reconstruction. Our modem world has as 
little patience with Aristotelian syllogisms as with the 
literature of Euphuism. But it has a profound and 



6o THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

ever growing interest in human needs. If theology 
would not die of intellectual dry-rot, it must be- 
come biological and social. 

2. The second possible objection is the precise 
opposite of the first. It may be urged that such a 
conception of the modern man gives too much promi- 
nence to theology. A belief in an immanent God, 
it may be objected, so narrows the field as to limit 
discussion of the acceptability of the gospel to those 
already predisposed to religion. And thus the atheist 
and the agnostic are excluded. 

Such a limitation, however, is unavoidable. True, 
some "modern men" are thoroughgoing champions 
of naturalism and to them any call to recognize the 
inner world of spirit, in which and because of which the 
inconsistencies, the minutiae, and the otherwise mean- 
ingless infinitude of changes find order and meaning, 
would be idle. But such men can find their philoso- 
phy satisfying only as they neglect or distort the super- 
naturalistic facts of the spiritual life, the timeless values 
that gleam forth from all events in time. Those who 
believe in God and the world of spiritual freedom, 
be that belief never so unlike that of conventional 
theology, are the only persons to whom the gospel can 
make its appeal. And this class forms the overwhelm- 
ing majority of those who share in the new social 



THE MODERN MAN 6l 

mind. Atheists and confirmed agnostics there may 
be, but they are few enough, and I am persuaded that 
many even of them would prefer to accept the gospel 
if they judged it amenable to the ordinary laws of 
thought. Judging this impossible they prefer the 
religion of philosophy to the religion of the New 
Testament. The prevailing attitude of the modern 
man toward Christianity is one of intellectual con- 
fusion, but of moral sympathy. Moral discontent, 
apprehensive curiosity as to the outcome of death, and 
that sense of dependence and helplessness which 
every man sooner or later feels in the presence of the 
universe, can always be counted upon as motives to 
lead thoughtful men to give respectful attention to 
any serious presentation of the real message of Jesus. 
The church has a real mission to men and women 
who are utterly out of sympathy with religion, but 
it owes quite as important and even more pressing 
service to that rapidly growing class who consciously 
or unconsciously find their faith imperiled by the re- 
ligious implications of the modern mind. Sometimes 
such persons most irritatingly boast of modernism. 
Sometimes, equally unfortunately for their own peace 
of mind, they lament their inability to think in terms 
of those older presuppositions which make the gospel 
so easily acceptable. Sometimes they grow impatient 



62 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

and arrogant, but at heart every such man knows him- 
self to be morally imperfect and longs for the peace 
that comes from the harmony of religious conceptions 
with those of the philosophy and science he has 
come to see are not to be denied. And it is this four- 
fold attitude of mind with which the gospel must be 
shown and can be shown to be consonant. If we 
are to bring the gospel to the modern man, we must 
set forth the permanent values of the Christianity of 
the New Testament, and above all of the historical 
Jesus himself, in the light of evolution, divine 
immanence, social solidarity, and a sense of reality 
bom of scientific method and a perception of worth. 



CHAPTER III 

THE CONTENT OF THE GOSPEL 

The old gospel faces a new age. Therein lies its 
problem. But is it worth answering? Why go 
back thus to the New Testament and seek to recover 
and reenforce the primitive eschatological gospel? 
Why not rather seek to discover truth by an explora- 
tion of religious experience as we know it to-day, 
using the New Testament as one of its many sources ? 
Or, on the other hand, why should we not accept some 
approved theology and find peace in submission to 
ecclesiastical authority ? 

Such questions are legitimate. The gospel is not 
identical with Christianity, if that term be used to 
represent the present religion that originated in the 
gospel but has taken up elements from civilization. 
But, whether we like it or not, a truly evangelical 
Christianity is not only the religion most susceptible 
of philosophical justification, but it is a religion that 
will rise and fall with the New Testament. Even a 
better religion than that of Jesus and Paul would 

63 



64 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

not be theirs. For my part I am perfectly ready to 
substitute something better for the gospel as soon as 
it appears, but I am as yet unable to imagine anything 
more final than the religion of Jesus as found in the 
New Testament. Christianity as we know it still 
fails to represent that religion. Jesus still leads the 
spiritual life. The religion of the future must be 
evangelical or it will be socially powerless. At all 
events that seems to be the testimony of two thousand 
years of experiment. During those two millenia 
every conceivable substitute for the gospel has been 
tried. Docetism, gnosticism, Ophitism, and Mani- 
cheeism in the ancient church; chiliasm, fanaticism, 
rationalism, and anathematizing sects of every sort 
in the later church, all have failed. Only those 
religious bodies who have preserved the continuity 
of that doctrinal development which embodies 
religion as it is set forth in the gospel of the New 
Testament are to-day of commanding significance. 
I cannot believe that it will be otherwise in the 
future. The Christians of to-morrow will differ 
from us in many particulars, but they will be at one 
with the spiritual life as it is portrayed in the gospel, 
or else they will shrivel into esoteric groups united 
for the cooperative support of private chaplains. 
The modern man has vested interests in Christ and 



THE CONTENT OF THE GOSPEL 6$ 

the gospel he would be foolish to surrender simply 
because he finds it difl&cult to realize upon them. 
For this if for no other reason he must be brought 
to take the gospel seriously. It must be no mere 
theological debate into which he is introduced. If 
the gospel is not to be relegated by the educated class 
to the antiquarians as a naive superstition, we must 
frankly face the situation set by the new social mind 
and discover a method by which men, without iso- 
lating the world of religion from the world of science, 
may hold to the teachings of the gospel as elements of 
a religious world-view that will bring not only intellec- 
tual peace but spiritual uplift. Skepticism is not the 
sign-manual of spiritual enlightenment. We believe 
as truly as we interrogate. Let us, then, count our 
assets as honestly as we count our liabilities. How- 
ever numerous our theologies, there is only one 
gospel. 

Such a task must be undertaken irenically, con- 
structively and patiently, in full sympathy and utmost 
cooperation with men of unscientific and unphilo- 
sophical mind. If there is to be a reunited church 
every Barnabas and Paul must give the right hand 
of fellowship to every James and Peter. Your 
born radical cannot understand why the average 
man is so slow to break connection with the past in 



66 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

any phase of life and particularly in the region of 
religion. He needs to be taught sympathy with those 
who are wisely conservative and yet whose loyalty 
to the things of the spirit is as intense as his own. On 
the other hand, those who would estop real thinking on 
religion by the assertion that " what was good enough 
for my saintly mother is good enough for me" also 
need to see that the life of the spirit is not iden- 
tical with its temporal expression. The difficulty 
with such an attitude of mind lies not in the regard 
which the man has for what was sacred to his 
mother, but rather in the fact that he cannot think 
as did his mother. More than that, his own son, 
lacking any such ties of sentiment, is in imminent 
danger of falling into religious indifference. If the 
children of religious reformers are very likely to be 
spiritual dilettanti, the children of religious reaction- 
aries are likely to be Epicureans. 

I 

Two current methods of determining the relation of 
the gospel to our age are easily recognized ; the liter- 
alistic and the negative. 

I. There are plenty of people who are attempting a 
divorce of their religious life from their best intellec- 
tual efforts. But such divorce can result only in 



THE CONTENT OF THE GOSPEL 67 

misery. When religion becomes simply a matter 
of sentiment, unregulated and unapproved by a man's 
best thinking, it begins to lose its power to inspire 
Christlike morality. 

A merely superficial examination of the religious 
world shows the truth of this generalization. On the 
one side there is an increasing reverence for reality, 
or, if reality is beyond our reach, a frank avowal of 
ignorance. On the other side there is a strong 
pressure being brought to bear upon the religious 
man, which, whatever its terminology, amounts to 
this : Stop thinking over fundamentals ! Accept cer- 
tain doctrines as final because the church has held 
them in the past and it is impossible either to disprove 
or to prove them. Rest content in enthusiasm for 
religion as distinct from theology. Accept the au- 
thority of the church and cease the attempt to find 
reasons where submission to ecclesiastical decisions 
alone can bring peace. Was it not Augustine, the 
father of both Roman and Protestant orthodoxy, 
who said, "I would not believe even the gospel ex- 
cept the authority of the Catholic church moved me 
thereto"? 

It is natural that such an attitude of mind should 
express itself as hostile to any type of theology except 
that formed by a literalistic use of the New Testa- 



68 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

ment. Unwilling to abandon formulas hallowed by 
the reverence of the past, its champions insist that, 
regardless of modern views, certain things are to 
be received on authority and are not to be sub- 
jected to the ordinary processes of scientific testing 
and systematization. The New Testament is to 
be carried over bodily into our religious thinking. 
Under the guise of a loyalty to the "old gospel'' 
there is thus propagated an enthusiasm which too 
frequently leaves its possessor hostile to a sponta- 
neous expression of his spiritual life in the concepts 
of his own day, clinging to beliefs which can be held 
only at the cost of that view of the world which is 
dominating the thinking of to-day and will even more 
dominate the thinking of to-morrow. 

Whenever such a citizen of the world of churches 
becomes a citizen of the world of laboratories he 
encounters great difficulties. Too frequently he is 
swept over into complete distrust of his older faith. 
Chemistry and physics, biology and history, conspire 
to aid the triumph of naturalism. Without properly 
stopping to consider the foolishness of such an act, 
many a man who has been forced from a literalistic 
use of the gospel has turned away from the Bible in 
much the same way as that in which he turns from 
the sacred writings of other people. The difficulties 



THE CONTENT OF THE GOSPEL 69 

which beset his olden-time religious enthusiasm have 
been magnified, and he relegates Christian faith to 
children and the masses and turns to Matter and 
the great Unknown. 

The subjection of the spiritual life to a literalistic 
use of the eschatological gospel, however, does not 
always result in such unfortunate agnosticism. It 
also persists in the case of men who either deliber- 
ately or instinctively have refused to come under the 
influence of our modern world-view. The only 
serious concession which they would make to the 
world of science is as to the time of the second coming 
of Jesus. This event Christians of this theological 
type are ready to hold was seen by the apostles in a 
*' prophetic perspective" and therefore out of precise 
chronological relations. Conceptions of this sort 
obviously imply an abandonment of the modern 
world as constituted by science, though they do not 
always involve the complete subjection of the life of 
the spirit to the bondage of the letter. Yet there are 
thousands of men and women of noblest Christian 
character, of splendid moral enthusiasm and religious 
earnestness, who believe in a hell of literal fire, in a 
personal devil, in demoniacal possession, in the abso- 
lute inerrancy of all the Biblical writings, in the 
creation of the world in six days, in the physical 



7© THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

coming of Christ in the sky, and in the materialistic 
resurrection of the body through a miraculous re- 
combination of its original or other particles. Such 
persons may be modern to their finger tips when it 
comes to business, but religiously and philosophically 
they are to all intents and purposes citizens of the first 
century of our era. Theologically speaking, they 
are contemporary but not modern. 

No serious thinker can fail to respect such loyalty 
to a literalistic gospel or to seek to emulate the 
earnest religion it engenders. You will find it in the 
hearts of consecrated evangelists, lay workers. Sal- 
vation Army lasses and American Volunteers. But 
what can be done in the case of a man who cannot 
share in such indifference to the modern world? 
Shall he be forbidden the kingdom of God except as 
he first rejects his science and his belief of the God of 
Law? Must he who passionately, even heroically, 
holds to the absoluteness of the supranatural, time- 
less, spiritual life, be forced to clothe his faith in 
symbols he believes to be but relative and unsatis- 
fying? 

2. At the other extreme from these who thus 
separate religion from thinking in the interests of a 
literalistic interpretation of the gospel are those who 
hold aloof from the gospel on the ground that it is 



THE CONTENT OF THE GOSPEL 7 1 

Utterly inconsistent with current science and philoso- 
phy. They emphasize the difference in the character 
of the data given and demanded by science and 
theology respectively and discredit religious certitude. 
There is, it is true, among such persons a growing dis- 
position to recognize religion as inherently human. 
But interest in the psychology and history of religion 
is too often seen to culminate in a pseudo-philosophy 
that holds that religious experience is but a phase 
of sex- and social-development To persons of this 
type, the gospel, in any approach to the sense that 
we have seen it held in the ancient church, is a mat- 
ter of merely antiquarian interest. At the best they 
regard it as a sort of '' suggestion" that may help the 
unsophisticated to regain his health. 

II 

We are sometimes given to understand that there 
is no third alternative; that either we must reject 
the gospel of the historical Jesus in the interest of 
science, or reject science in the interest of the historical 
gospel. To the student of history, however, such an 
antithesis is not exclusive. He knows that there is a 
third alternative, that of true conservatism; viz. such 
an historical evaluation of the gospel as it stands in 
the New Testament as will disclose both its histor- 



72 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

ical and its timeless realities and will make possible 
a formulation of its content in modern terms and in 
accordance with constructive principles which are 
the equivalents of the controlling expositions of Jesus 
and his message to be found in the New Testament. 
I. Such a method involves : — 

(a) The discovery by the methods of historico- 
literary criticism of the oldest records of the life of 
Jesus and of the primitive Christian faith. 

(b) The comparison of the world- view of New Tes- 
tament times with the contents of such records and 
the classification of the elements of the world-view 
found in the gospel. 

(c) The distinction between such world-view and 
the positive data of the spiritual life of the gospel it 
correlates or interprets. 

(d) The discovery by comparison and other tests 
of the elements of such world-view as are actually con- 
structive principles of the gospel in the formulation of 
the content of the spiritual life in a particular histori- 
cal situation. 

{e) The combination of the positive data of the 
gospel in accordance with concepts which are the 
equivalents of such of these primitive constructive 
and interpretative concepts which have been found to 
possess more than temporary and pictorial value. 



THE CONTENT OF THE GOSPEL 73 

It is not possible at this time to discuss the critical 
process. Such brief treatment as we can give it 
must be postponed to our discussion of the historicity 
of Jesus. Just now let us assume that trustworthy 
records springing from the followers of Jesus can be 
found by criticism — an assumption all but unques- 
tioned — and turn to the problems of discovering 
what is the real content of the gospel both as regards 
data and systematizing and evaluating concepts. 

2. Starting with the original sources resulting from 
the critical process we shall find our problem to no 
small degree simplified. While the New Testament 
as it stands is now almost universally admitted to con- 
tain within itself material which has been superim- 
posed upon the original teaching of Jesus, this added 
material is not different in kind from the material in the 
oldest sources. Criticism at this point removes from 
the gospel distracting details rather than a general 
world- view such as that which has already been de- 
scribed as conditioning the men of the New Testa- 
ment period. Further, if it is comparatively easy to 
discover the general presuppositions that sprang 
from the social mind of the first century, it is quite 
as easy to recognize the particular controlling con- 
cept by which the first disciples made intelligible 
and real to themselves the significance of Jesus. 



74 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

As has already been said, this controlling concept is 
messianism. To this we must find clear equivalents 
in our modern presuppositions if our theology is 
really to be evangelical. 

The comparative study of religion enables us to see 
that the messianic concept as it appears in the New 
Testament is derived from the Judaism of Jesus' 
day. For if we come up to the gospel through 
the history of Jewish eschatology as seen in the 
apocalypses written in the three centuries following 
the attempt of Antiochus Epiphanes to crush the 
Jewish religion, we are struck by the almost complete 
parallelism between the two hopes. ^ The two ages, 
the present under the control of Satan, who must be 
conquered, a heavenly Jerusalem which is to be 
established upon the earth in the glorious age which 
is to come, a Christ, a summoning of the dead from 
Sheol in order to be judged, a Judgment Day, a lake 
of fire, a resurrection of the righteous, all are in the 
literature of Judaism, which, as has already been said, 
is in turn a development of literary and religious 
tendencies traceable to older Eastern religions. It 
is impossible to see in them the characteristic and 
peculiar contribution of Christianity to religion. 

^ The reader who cares to pursue this subject may be referred 
to my " Messianic Hope in the New Tejstamenj;." 



THE CONTENT OF THE GOSPEL 75 

But thanks to such comparison we can distinguish the 
characteristic facts of the gospel from the inherited 
interpretative element. 

3. As a result of the process involved in making this 
first distinction between the content and the interpreta- 
tive concepts we have the following formulation of the 
positive elements which are involved in the general 
conception of the gospel heralded by Jesus and elabo- 
rated by Paul as a message of an assured way of sal- 
vation from evil, sin, and death. 

(a) The God of Law is the God of Love ; that is to 
say, the universe both physical and spiritual, in which 
we live, is an expression of a spiritual life that is 
knowable, purposeful, and loving. 

(6) This God of Love is redemptively revealed in 
and by Jesus, his death being the exposition of the 
unity of divine love and law. 

(c) Man can be forgiven ; that is, can reach more 
perfectly moral personal development and can triumph 
over the effects of sin by a repentance that leads to a 
voluntary personal union with God, and the consequent 
all-sufficient reinforcement of his spiritual life by God. 

(d) The act of faith which makes possible such a 
union is evoked by the historical Jesus. To have 
faith in him is to have faith in God. 

(e) There is a certain and blessed individual im^ 



76 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

mortality superior to the earthly life for those who are 
possessed of a spiritual life like God's as revealed in 
Jesus ; the guaranty of which is the historic fact of 
the resurrection of Jesus. 

(/") There is possible and certain a new social order 
in which men's relations to each other shall be those 
of brothers because they shall have become sons of 
God, and are thus empowered to further the triumph 
of the spiritual life in the midst of the temporal order. 

Or, more systematically, the gospel is a message 
of the redemptive love of the God of Law ; of God's 
presence in Jesus ; of a spiritual and therefore more 
individual life beyond death made possible by the 
transformation of the repentant human personality by 
dynamic personal union with the God of Love 
mediated by faith in Jesus; and of a regenerate 
society that shall bring blessing to the individual 
because of the socialization of the regenerate spiritual 
life of individuals, — all revealed as realizable and 
morally just by the supreme teaching, the spiritual 
experiences, the sinless life, the death and the resur- 
rection of the historical Jesus, and further guaranteed 
by the spiritual experience of his followers who ac- 
cept the message as true and make it controlling in 
their own lives. 

The two foci of this good news, the historical Jesus 



THE CONTENT OF THE GOSPEL 77 

and the experience of the Spirit by Christians, cannot 
be shown to be derived from any precedent expecta- 
tion among the Jews of the New Testament times. 
In fact, they contradict messianic expectations as 
they are known to us in contemporary literature. 
They cannot be accounted for by any sane religio- 
historical method, and must be regarded as two pri- 
mary and original contributions of Christianity to 
religious history. 

4. And further, it is evident to any student of the 
New Testament that the center of this message is in 
life rather than in teaching. But not in physical life. 
The gospel presupposes and validates the belief in 
spiritual life, which though not to be consciously 
separated from the totality of our present mode 
of existence is yet the true life of man, since it is 
that which separates him from the animal and makes 
him in the image of God who is Spirit. Indeed, one 
might define the gospel as the exposition of the na- 
ture, the moral possibilities, and the certain triumph 
over the impersonal elements of our person, of the 
spiritual life as it is finally revealed in the historical 
Jesus. And this spiritual life, the gospel always 
insists, reaches its moral power only as it is in renew- 
ing union with the Holy Spirit that comes to the 
followers of the Lord who is the Spirit. 



78 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

III 

I am convinced that any faithful exploration of 
social and individual experience will confirm this 
formulation of the heart of the gospel. It is because 
men believed in these fundamental spiritual verities, as 
well as in the figures and ethnic hopes in which they 
were expressed, that Christianity cut loose from 
Judaism, conquered the Roman empire, and is still 
operative in our evolving civilization. The gospel 
includes moral and social ideals which are more than 
visionary because they have been incarnated in an 
actual life. It is more than a philosophical generali- 
zation, because it is grounded on the experience of the 
cosmic spiritual life by definitely historical persons. 
It has become dynamic through the ages because it 
has reached the motive forces of character as some- 
thing based upon facts made intelligible to different 
ages through the medium of the best thinking of those 
ages. 

Doctrine-making is a social process which tran- 
scends the individual's expression of his own spiritual 
life. Dogmas are the authoritative formulations by 
which the social mind of any age makes intelligible 
to itself its religious experience. A theological 
system to be effective must correlate all germane 



THE CONTENT OF THE GOSPEL 79 

religious facts with the ultimate and controlling 
conceptions of its day. 

It has been thus that the gospel has been brought 
into dynamic relations with each successive and es- 
sentially new social mind and thus maintained the 
continuity of the spiritual content of human experi- 
ence through historical changes. The third century 
brought it into regenerating unity with its experience 
through its "essence" philosophy, and its belief 
in an eternally begotten Logos consubstantial with 
God the Father. The Middle Ages used it to work 
out the social and political reconstruction involved 
in the magnificent though impracticable program of 
a Holy Roman Empire. The Reformers brought it 
home to human life through the agency of a new 
estimate of the worth of the individual bom of an 
enlarging world-consciousness. The modem man 
can make it a source of individual and social regenera- 
tion by interpreting it to himself and to his world 
through those conceptions that are the best channels 
to the center of his intellectual and spiritual being. 

I. While a completely systematized theology is not 
necessary to the success of an attempt to bring the 
gospel to the modern man, in the very nature of the 
case, we must, if possible, find some coordinating 
principle that on the one hand shall bring the ele- 



8o THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

ments of the gospel into harmony with the controlling 
world-view. If such a unifying thought is to be true 
to the gospel, it must be an equivalent of the messianic 
formula. Indeed, the method of equivalency must 
control the entire presentation of the gospel if it is 
to be true to its original content. For, as we have 
already seen, the gospel was not merely a group of 
truths and facts; it was also the valuation of those 
truths and facts in terms of messianism in the interest 
of the spiritual man. That is to say, it was the his- 
torical form given to ultimate spiritual realities, which 
form itself, in so far as it, too, was the expression of the 
spiritual life, has permanent value. For we cannot 
altogether separate except in thought the elements of 
a religion of the Spirit. If only it can assimilate the 
proper elements from its intellectual and social en- 
vironment it is enriched and strengthened. And this 
has been true of the Christian life. But it has always 
expressed itself in thought forms that enabled it to 
function in particular historical situations, and these 
thought forms themselves are useful only as they 
enable the spiritual life inspired by the gospel to ex- 
press itself normally. The endeavor to find equiva- 
lents for the successive organs of spiritual self- 
expression is not an uncritical perpetuation of the 
identical New Testament conceptions or those of later 



THE CONTENT OF THE GOSPEL 8 1 

dogmas. Terms used to express a thoroughly social- 
ized concept grow symbolic rather than strictly 
definitive. In religious history they are the points of 
contact at which the spiritual life of one age realizes 
its unity with and draws inspiration from the spiritual 
life of the past; the means by which experience is 
aided by experience to enriched development. 

Let us then briefly attempt the discovery of the 
modern equivalents of messianism; that is to say, of 
the concepts in which the content of the gospel as 
above formulated can be made to minister to the 
religious life of the modern man. 

The general scheme of messianism involves in itself 
certain component concepts which, despite the unac- 
customedness of their formal expression, are obviously 
contained in our modern world-view. The three 
most important of these concepts are the sovereignty 
of God, eschatology, and salvation. The equivalents 
of these three elements are fundamental for any at- 
tempt to set forth the gospel from the point of view of 
the modern man. 

I. The first equivalent is that for the belief in the 
sovereignty of God. 

Sovereignty was an analogy, but it was the most 
inclusive analogy under which the ancient world 
which shaped our ecumenical orthodoxy undertook 

G 

\ 



82 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

to set forth its conception of God. The modern man 
with his democracy and his science can hardly be 
expected to get full value from either the concept 
or the terms of such a world-view. God is more than 
a sovereign. He is God. Yet sovereignty expresses 
a reality which cannot be overlooked — God as the 
ultimate and controlling reality in human life both in- 
dividual and social. We do not look to Him to find 
any likeness to the oriental monarch, but regarding 
Him as immanent Life, beneficently working through, 
determining and expressing Himself in the age- 
long process which involves both matter and history, 
we conceive of Him, not as Process, but as the source 
and guide of all progress. Humanity must submit 
to and conform to God, conceived of not as politically 
but as cosmically personal. Here the conception of 
the God of law persists, with the difference that law 
is no longer regarded as the statutory enactments of a 
sovereign but as the expression of God's rational and 
beneficent will as seen in the very nature of things and 
most of all in the spiritual order from which we derive 
authority and assistance for our own spiritual life. 

2. The second equivalent is that for eschatology. 

I am aware that at this point I am very likely to 
part company with some of those who may have agreed 
with the positions thus far taken. Eschatology, with 



THE CONTENT OF THE GOSPEL 83 

its salvation by catastrophe and its strange imagery, 
seems to many quite beyond the range of possibility 
of acceptance by the modern man. But unless I 
mistake completely, persons holding such an opinion 
fail to approach the subject with full historical 
sympathies and so fail to analyze the actual content of 
the concept. Eschatology, it is true, as represented 
in the Jewish apocalypses is a bizarre mixture of 
symbols, but he is a superficial student of the ancient 
world who can see in these apocalypses nothing that 
reaches into the depths of religious faith. When one 
ceases to look at it in its broad lines, eschatology at 
once appears to have been something more than an 
irridescent dream. 

In the first place it was a pictorial presentment in 
terms of catastrophe of what we should call the 
teleology of social evolution. For it was primarily 
a politico-social hope. It looked not to a theological 
heaven, but to a social order, the kingdom of God. 
Its very heart was confidence in that divine deliverance 
which God was to give His people by establishing 
through the national Saviour an actual, triumphant, 
and ideal society. Catastrophe was only incidental 
to such a hope. It was simply the way in which the 
ancient world conceived of God's accomplishing his 
redemptive purpose in human history. 



84 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

Eschatology, in the second place, included the 
hope of personal immortality and resurrection. 
Immortality was involved in the new social order 
which God was to establish, since all the subjects of 
the kingdom were to share in its blessings. The 
resurrection was not that of the physical body from 
the grave, but, if we correctly interpret Josephus, was 
a formula for expressing the Pharisees' belief in the 
efficient and superior form of individual existence 
to be enjoyed by the righteous. 

A third belief which eschatological pictures ex- 
pressed was that of the inevitableness of the postponed 
outcome of forces resident in national and individual 
character. In its picture of the Judgment Day it set 
forth a profound conviction common to all humanity ; 
that which the Buddhist expresses in his doctrine of 
Karma and which the apostle epitomized in his 
axiom ''what a man sows that he shall also reap"; 
that which the modern idealist finds in the triumph 
of an absolute spiritual order : — the conviction that 
moral actions are moral forces producing results. 
In a universe like ours, goodness ultimately cannot 
bring forth pain; badness ultimately cannot bring 
forth happiness. To believe otherwise would be to 
distrust the reason and goodness of the immanent 
God himself. 



THE CONTENT OF THE GOSPEL 85 

These three conceptions, the future divinely es- 
tablished social order, personal immortality involv- 
ing a further advance of the regenerate individual 
through the resurrection, and the inevitableness of 
pain or blessing as the outcome of character because 
of God's working in the moral-personal realm — 
these were the heart of early Christian eschatology. 
Each is in a way the inheritance taken over from 
Judaism, but none of them is merely formal or picto- 
rial. Each possesses an ethical content as truly as a 
religious. Feasts with Abraham, heavenly taber- 
nacles, a New Jerusalem let down from heaven, cos- 
mic catastrophes, the judgment throne and the lake 
of fire, are the picture forms in which the regenerate 
society, the regenerate individual, and the finality of 
the moral order are set forth. Such fundamental be- 
liefs as these cannot safely be lost from any religion. 
Paradoxical as it may seem, eschatology in these 
equivalents brings the gospel into closest touch with the 
thought of the modem world. Any man who, in the 
spirit of the New Testament, would attempt scientifi- 
cally to minister to our day must embody it in his 
message. He cannot omit the effects of God's pres- 
ence and activity in social evolution, the future of the 
individual, the triumph of righteousness and the 
spiritual order. 



S6 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

3. Thus, thirdly, messianism, because it is escha- 
tological is but a part of the supreme conception 
of divine salvation which the gospel revealed. In 
that conception there are involved two elements : that 
of the kingdom of God and that of the triumph of the 
individual over sin and death. The first demands 
that our theology be social ; the second that it make 
a free, social, spiritual individuality the supreme result 
of the redemptive process. 

IV 

Just what sort of theology will result from such 
equivalents it is not our purpose to consider in detail, 
nor is it so important as the question as to what sort 
of contribution the gospel can make to the totality of 
our spiritual life. Philosophical and theological 
precision is here secondary to vital efficiency. Yet 
such efficiency must to no inconsiderable degree 
rest upon the reasonableness of the evangelic message. 
Nor need we here lose heart. Indispensable as is 
the final test of its individual and social efficiency, 
our faith is not based on cunningly devised fables or 
laboriously devised definitions. Suffice it to say that 
the constituent truths of the gospel can fairly be 
correlated with the facts given by various sciences 
into working hypotheses that can be tested by 



THE CONTENT OF THE GOSPEL 87 

human experience, and so systematized into reason- 
able acceptability by some controlling concept of the 
modern social mind. Metaphysical explanations 
and justifications we can leave to that type of theology 
that prefers to begin with theories of knowledge and 
the formative assumptions of a philosophy of religion. 
Our own field is that of the creatively active per- 
sonality finding, under the guidance of the gospel, 
completest expression and realization in personal 
relations with other personalities and with the God 
of the ever progressing universe. 

The true content of the gospel should not be ob- 
scured by any analysis of its elements. Within our 
humanity it sees two warring forces, the one lusting 
back to the fleshpots of pleasure and the comforts of 
that impersonal life from which humanity has so 
valiantly struggled to be free ; the other ever striving 
for self-expression in that increasingly supranatural 
spiritual life in which, be it never so dimly, it has 
ever seen its goal. Freedom and salvation can come 
only as this higher life of the spirit triumphs. And 
the way to this triumph the gospel shows in its insist- 
ence that it is possible for those who are in dynamic 
union with God, and in its historical presentation 
of Jesus as its perfectly individualized expression. 
In him was life and the life is the light of men. To 



BS THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

be saved is to live that life; to live it is to be saved. 
That is the heart of the gospel. All else is naturalism 
and the distractive allurement of Illumination. 

Because Christianity thus opens the way to the full 
realization of the spiritual life, it is redemptive. 
To make the gospel anything else than a message 
of deliverance, both negative and positive, would be 
to give it a new character. Any religion to be of 
significance must do something for its followers. The 
moment it is reduced to a code of divinely authorized 
worldly wisdom or to a philosophy with merely in- 
tellectual appeal, it becomes the property only of the 
intellectual aristocrat, and even with him it is always 
exposed to the epigram or the syllogism of some rival. 
We, as truly as the citizens of the ancient world, have 
our Satan, our sin, our death. The fact that we do 
not picture them to ourselves in quite the same way 
as did the ancient world by no means destroys the 
evils for which these awful names stand. Those 
relentless natural forces that would enslave us and 
ever bring us and all whom we love so much of sorrow 
— we want to be delivered from them. The sin 
which so easily besets us and attacks us so unex- 
pectedly and so viciously — we want to be delivered 
from that. Death, which seems sometimes the 
very quintessence of waste and irrationality as well 



THE CONTENT OF THE GOSPEL 89 

as terror — we want to be delivered from that. 
Nor would we be saved alone and individually. The 
sense of the solidarity of human society calls for the 
regeneration also of the social forces that are always 
making To-morrow. And here too the gospel meets 
our needs. It thrills with the hope of the regenera- 
tion of the social order. Its God would bring men 
not only to a heaven beyond death but to the New 
Jerusalem which is to be set up upon earth, a trium- 
phant order of the spirit in which His will shall be 
done as it is in heaven. 

To establish the reasonableness of this message of 
a salvation that consists in the social and individual 
realization of the spiritual life as revealed in Jesus, 
by showing it to be consistent with the dominant pre- 
suppositions of to-day's thought and action, is to 
evoke a response and allegiance on the part of the 
modem man as truly as from those who do not share 
in his view of the universe. But to make such mes- 
sage reasonable is not an end in itself. The gospel does 
not need above all to be proved to be true. I doubt 
if many men were ever argued from sin over to God by 
apologetics. They need to be convinced rather that 
the act of faith evoked by the presentation of Jesus, 
even though it be incipient and, as it were, tentative, 
is justifiable from the point of view of the spiritual 



go THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

immanence of God, a divinely directed evolution, 
historical criticism, and the ultimate values of life. 
This is the method of the true apologetic: not the 
discussion of the mutual relation of definitions and 
speculations, nor yet the exposition of the metaphysi- 
cal truth of various doctrines outside the limits of 
experience; but the justification of the act of faith 
in the God revealed in and by Jesus as rationally 
worthy of a man wholeheartedly at one with the age 
in which he lives. 

Herein lies our next task. Having discovered 
historically the content of the gospel as a message 
of divine redemption we shall proceed first to show 
that it can be accepted by the modem man as reason- 
able because of its accord with his own constructive 
thinking, and then shall attempt to show positively 
that the gospel is a divine dynamic making towards 
the emancipation and the perfection of personality 
here and hereafter, and towards that better social 
order toward which our modem in its constructive 
moods is looking. 



PART II 
THE REASONABLENESS OF THE GOSPEL 

CHAPTER IV 

JESUS THE CHRIST 

The gospel is a message of individual and social 
salvation through the spiritual inworking of a God 
who is at once love and law, revealed in and guaran- 
teed by the experience of the historical Jesus. That is 
the quintessence of Christian truth. But is this 
guarantee itself of value? Can we still believe in a 
gospel that thus involves an historical person like 
the Jesus the apostles preached? 

It is not enough to say that history knows no other 
Jesus with evangelic power, although such a state- 
ment would be undeniable. A prophet of Nazareth, 
a social reformer, an ethical teacher, a beloved 
martyr, — neither is the Jesus who has conquered 
the world. The only Jesus who can reveal and guar- 
antee the evangelic method of deliverance from de- 
spair, sin, and death is the Jesus who in the cold light 
of criticism can be known himself to have conquered 

91 



92 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

sin and death ; who, as the unique and perfect ex- 
pression of the God-life, determines a man's rela- 
tion to God. 

True, the evangelic message of a God of love who 
delivers man by reinvigorating him with new spiritual 
power might still help us even if the Jesus of the New 
Testament should disappear in the crucible of his- 
torical criticism. The religious conception of the 
universe built up by Christian experience would be 
still a message of deliverance. Conceivably — but to 
my mind tragically — Christianity might supplant 
Jesus. As shaped by the century-long experience of 
the Christian community, it contains much that is 
self-validating. Social evolution enlightened by the 
Christian church would teach us it is better to live 
in accordance with the supposition that a God of 
Law is a God of Love, that individual development 
is not to be stopped short by death, that the spiritual 
order is superior to the natural, and that a better 
community is yet to be formed. But, apologetically 
strong as such a daring, I had almost said reck- 
less, position may be, it is weak indeed when 
compared with the same teachings backed by an 
assurance of the trustworthiness of the evangelic pic- 
ture of a genuinely historical Jesus, the concrete 
exposition of the supremacy of the spiritual life. 



JESUS THE CHRIST 93 

It is inevitable that the gospel should appear at 
the bar of criticism. However much we may argue 
that apart from any historical basis the essential 
truths of the New Testament are in themselves ca- 
pable of evoking faith, few of us have so accustomed 
ourselves to the high altitudes of academic thought as 
to find it possible to gain spiritual uplift in an alleged 
historic fact we are convinced has become merely 
** functional." An empty revolver functions ad- 
mirably as long as the highwayman thinks it loaded, 
but what if he discovers his mistake ? History that 
has lost its historicity becomes, except perhaps among 
philosophers, of equally dubious value. Your aver- 
age modem man has not yet lost his Wirklichkeitsinn, 
to wit, his common sense. 



In so far as the gospel involves the historical Jesus, 
in so far must it be amenable to the laws governing 
historical investigation. 

I. Throughout its history the church has been com- 
pelled to defend its position against those who have 
mishandled the historical substratum of its teaching. 
It was the practice of many of the early sects to pro- 
duce counterfeit gospels for the purpose of justify- 
ing some peculiar view. A considerable number of 



94 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

these have come down to us either in whole or in part, 
but with the possible exception of the Gospel of the 
Hebrews they are utterly unhistorical. In them 
all there are barely half a dozen incidents or sayings 
that can be accepted as in any sense genuine. In some 
cases these gospels contain elaborate descriptions of 
events preceding the birth of Christ, of his boyhood, 
of his crucifixion and resurrection, and of his descent to 
the abode of the departed spirits. The motive in 
such construction was either to give authority and 
weight to certain peculiar views or to supply the 
want of information about some period of Jesus^ 
life. Both purposes are equally open to moral ob- 
jections from our own point of view. 

While it is true that such writings as these testify 
to the church's belief that Christianity is grounded on 
history, they also testify to the indifference of the 
early church to elemental historical accuracy. And 
this, too, in itself raises difficulties. We have passed 
from the age in which a doctrine can be substantiated 
by the manufacture of historical evidence. Indeed, 
the further we proceed in the comparative study of 
religion the more are we likely to be convinced that a 
religion's claim to an historical founder deserves 
particularly careful investigation. This impression 
has been deepened by the newer type of historical 



JESUS THE CHRIST 95 

criticism. In his zeal for discovering the actual 
value of historical evidence the critic has at times 
apparently assumed that everything was a lie until 
it was proved to be true. We all recall how in the 
first flush of rewriting Roman history the royal 
period was thrown into the waste basket. The fault, 
however, was not due to the method, but to the pre- 
conceptions with which critical pioneers undertook 
their work. 

This has been equally true in the case of the 
gospel records. In too many cases critics have been 
philologians whose idea of criticism has been that of 
literary analysis, or dogmatic liberals .who loved bril- 
liant conjectures better than sober corroborations. 
It is true that this phase of criticism is passing as the 
man with historical feeling has replaced ingenious 
word-surgeons, and men of method those of a priori 
temperament who made their theories a procrustean 
bed for historical documents. At the same time, there 
are still hobby riders in the field of criticism. In some 
cases this hobby consists in a rearrangement of 
material and an emendation of text on highly sub- 
jective grounds. In other cases it takes the form of 
an enthusiastic skepticism begotten of a monopoly of 
some philosophical presupposition. In still other 
cases negative criticism is due to an excessive ingenu- 



96 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

ity which reconstructs the gospel history along lines 
which are all but unintelligible to any one except the 
critic himself. And in criticism as in everything else 
it is not well to be too clever. 

2. But after all allowance is made for scholarship 
of this sort the historical method brings us face to 
face with some very serious questions. When, for 
example, were our present gospels written, and by 
whom? The average man has ready only an indis- 
tinct answer. The probability is that he regards 
them as having been written as they stand to-day by 
the men whose names have been attached to them by 
copyists. The historical student, however, sees in 
Matthew, Mark, and Luke the reworking of 
material very much older than the gospels in their 
present forms. Matthew, for instance, embodies 
matter which came from the apostle Matthew but is 
also in large measure derived from the Gospel of 
Mark reenforced by material drawn from collec- 
tions of the sayings of Jesus other than those to be 
found in Matthew and Luke, the whole being worked 
together possibly by Matthew himself, but certainly 
reedited by unknown writers. Much the same is 
true in the case of Luke. Even in the case of 
Mark evidences of redaction are not wanting. The 
subjective elements and late date of the Fourth 



JESUS THE CHRIST 97 

Gospel are admitted by conservative and radical 
alike. 

The first stage of this criticism was thoroughly 
destructive. The time of writing of the three Synop- 
tic Gospels was placed very late, while that of the 
Gospel of John was placed somewhere in the second 
quarter of the second century and even later. 
Within the past few years, however, critics are divid- 
ing themselves into two main groups. By far the 
larger of these, represented by genuinely historical in- 
vestigators, has pushed the time of writing back until 
the oldest strata of the Synoptic Gospels seem to be- 
long to the period prior to the destruction of Jerusa- 
lem (65-67 A.D.) and the Gospel of John to the end 
of the first century. The other and more radical 
group of critics is numerically small but has been 
given undue importance by the fact that its members 
have been given opportunity to express themselves 
in the pages of the Encyclopedia Bihlica. For these 
latter writers the gospels possess small historical 
value and represent merely the interpretation placed 
upon Jesus by the early Christians. According to 
criticism of the first type the figure of Jesus emerges 
with ever increasing distinctness. According to 
that of the second school Jesus is continuously 
retreating into the shadows of the past, until he 

H 



98 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

becomes barely the name of a man about whom we 
know with certainty all but nothing. 

The modern man will not abandon, he cannot aban- 
don, the historical method because of this difference in 
the results of its application, but between the pre- 
suppositions of these two sets of critics he can hardly 
fail to choose the more conservative. And for the 
very good reason that the negative positions reached 
by the second group imply something which from 
the point of view of method is close to critical suicide. 
The results of the less biased criticism on the other 
hand flow from true historical science. The fact that 
they have placed the historical foundation of the 
gospel, in so far at least as concerns the faith of the 
first disciples, upon unquestionable bases, is damag- 
ing evidence only to the man who believes that no 
method is scientific which proves something. It could 
not be otherwise in view of the generally accepted 
views regarding the structure of the Synoptic Gospels, 
and the chief epistles of Paul. Critical analysis 
has disclosed material which is older than the gospels 
themselves in their present form, which can be best 
described as coming from those whom Luke calls 
''eye-witnesses and ministers of the word," while the 
epistles of Paul carry us back to the days before this 
material had been reduced to written form. 



JESUS THE CHRIST 99 

3. Yet at this point we reach a new difficulty. 
That inveterate skepticism which assails every positive 
evangelic statement having been defeated in the re- 
gion of the dates of the gospels now assails this origi- 
nal material with the weapons of psychology and a 
theory of knowledge. In its extreme form it can see 
in Paul only an obscure man who never did much of 
anything except make a trip to Rome, and in his 
letters only lucubrations of an unknown writer of the 
second century concerning issues a century outgrown. 
All one can say of these conclusions of van Manen 
and his little school is that if the negative criticism 
which destroys the historical existence of Jesus be 
critical suicide this treatment of the Pauline litera- 
ture is critical madness. 

In its less extreme form the new criticism identifies 
historical records with experience and holds that all 
we have in such records is the judgment of value put 
by the early church upon Jesus. According to this 
view it is impossible actually to get at the historical 
Jesus. We can only recover the recollections, the 
impressions, the enthusiasm, and the faith of his 
followers. And these results, it is claimed, yield very 
obscure historical conclusions as to Jesus himself. 

Particularly in the case of the resurrection is this 
objection urged. This school of critics does not doubt 



lOO THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

that the early disciples believed that Jesus had ap- 
peared to them, but it insists that this belief was due 
to pure subjectivism. The stories of the resurrec- 
tion are the visualizing, so to speak, of the faith of the 
disciples born of intimate companionship with Jesus, 
and all that the gospel of the risen Christ really 
amounts to is that the early Christians were so 
convinced of the messiahship of Jesus that they could 
not believe that God had allowed him to perish. 
Under this conviction they thought they saw him. We 
have in the gospel, therefore, according to this school, 
correct statements as to what the apostles thought 
they saw, but no evidence that there was anything 
for them to see. 

Now this reduction of history to experience must be 
taken seriously. It has enough truth to make it 
exceedingly difficult to oppose. If one urges that it 
practically wipes the actual Jesus off the slate of 
history, one is likely to be met by the indignant 
asseveration that nothing of the sort is true ; that by 
faith we are sure there was such a Jesus, but that, 
as we cannot know him apart from the faith of the 
disciples, we cannot safely accept the account of those 
episodes in his life in which he differs from ordinary 
men. 

If on the other hand we attempt to argue that the 



JESUS THE CHRIST lOI 

situation in his case is no different from that of any 
other historical person, and that we have as much 
material with which to paint a general portrait of 
Jesus as of Plato, or Socrates, or even of Marcus 
Aurelius, we are told, as it were, with a shrug of the 
philosophical shoulders, that no one of those three 
men was said to have been raised from the dead. If 
we reply that it seems extraordinary that so great a 
movement should have sprung from a man with no 
climactic experience, and that it would seem as if 
he must have been more than remarkable not only to 
compel the allegiance and the supreme definitions of 
so keen a man as Paul but the God-valuation of 
the modern theologian himself, our answer is the 
issuance of the scholar's anathema — unscientific. 

Now we must admit that if we allow Jesus to be an 
ordinary person about whom we know nothing with 
certainty, we cannot believe in his resurrection. And it 
is also necessary to admit that when a person is dead 
we cannot know him except in the sense that we know 
something which people say about him. But that 
by no means proves that there was not in the character 
of Jesus something which warranted his contempo- 
raries' estimate of him, and further warrants our ac- 
acceptance of that estimate as the basis for our own 
conduct. I never heard Webster speak, and I am 



I02 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

ready to make all allowance for excessive admiration 
as well as for excessive dislike in the stories that have 
come down to us concerning him. But I have not the 
slightest doubt that Webster was an orator and 
statesman. I have no means of meeting the person 
Socrates, and I am perfectly ready to admit that the 
Socrates of the Platonic dialogues may be an idealized 
portrait of the Socrates who nagged the Athenians into 
thinking about serious matters and preferred the 
market place to companionship with Xantippe. But 
I have no doubt that Socrates lived, and that he was of 
sufficient importance in philosophy to warrant the 
portraits which Plato and Xenophon drew of him. 
I certainly cannot think of him as a mere lay figure 
on which Plato hung his own thoughts. 

Similarly in the case of Jesus. It is desirable to dis- 
tinguish as far as possible between the real Jesus and 
those estimates and descriptions with which the New 
Testament writers present him. But why should we 
not get positive results from the criticism as well as 
negative ? 

The pressing task for the systematic theologian is 
not so much that of the apologete who tries to find 
the irreducible minimum, and builds therefrom, as it 
is the constructive use of the results of a criticism 
which has brought us beyond a reasonable perad- 



JESUS THE CHRIST I03 

venture face to face with the beliefs of the original 
Christians. The business of a positive theology is 
not to discover how much of that primitive belief can 
be omitted, but how much of it is really correlatable 
with other things we know, and so is capable of 
being built inductively into a positive message for 
to-day's life. 

The question as to a real Jesus back of the experi- 
ence and faith of the first disciples must be answered 
by historians, not by metaphysicians. At the very 
outset we must have done with the analogy which 
finds a Jesus an sich as a sort of equivalent of the 
Ding an sich of metaphysics. It would be difficult 
to imagine a more unjustifiable source of confusion 
than the parallel which is drawn between the meta- 
physical difficulty of distinguishing the phenomenon 
from the noumenon and the difficulty of distinguish- 
ing between historical testimony and the person or 
event to which the testimony is brought. 

II 

This is not the place in which to trace in detail the 
working of the historical method by which the Jesus 
of history is found. It must suffice to set forth as 
succinctly as possible its results as an answer to the 
question, Is there more than one Jesus in the New 



I04 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

Testament ? And to avoid any suspicion of manipu- 
lation of material we will formulate these results as 
they come : from the Synoptic Gospels, the Pauline 
literature, and the Johannine literature. 

I. The Jesus of history as gained by a study of the 
oldest strata of the synoptic material has been some- 
times described as a prophet, that is to say, a teacher, 
more or less under the limitations of the messianic 
hope of his day, but one who did not regard himself 
as the Christ and whose ^'mighty works" the histo- 
rian cannot regard seriously. Such a view, however, 
is undeniably the minimum result of the projection 
of a dogmatic position into historical processes. A 
properly historical examination must give a different 
formulation. There are certain deeds ascribed to 
Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels as they stand to-day, 
which are not to be found in the oldest strata of ma- 
terial ; but, even in the case of the Infancy sections, 
their absence does not affect the general estimate 
which we must place upon him. The historical Jesus 
can still be described by the study of the reports of 
his words and deeds and his own self-consciousness 
as contained in these oldest sources which have been 
preserved in our Synoptic Gospels. In their light we 
must say that he was a person of moral perfection, 
possessed of remarkable powers to work cures through 



JESUS THE CHRIST I05 

the evoking of faith on the part of others ; a teacher 
who carried to what, so far as we can see, are their final 
results, the religious and ethical possibilities and con- 
ceptions of humanity ; a religious master whose very 
life was an imperative call to trust in the fatherly love 
of God ; and, although he never explicitly demanded 
such faith of his disciples, one who regarded himself 
as such an altogether unique manifestation of the 
Spirit of God as to be able to deliver men from sin 
and misery and death. Whether or not he concealed 
for a while this belief in his messianic vocation, he 
found, in the depths of his consciousness, impulses, 
ideals, volitions, and powers which he believed sprang 
from the presence of the Father who was thus em- 
powering him for his supreme mission. 

This self-estimate is one of the integral parts of the 
original gospel message. So far from being tenable 
appears to me the dictum of Schweitzer : " The Jesus 
of Nazareth who appeared as Messiah, taught the 
ethics of the kingdom, and died to consecrate his 
work never lived. He is a figure sketched by ration- 
alism, called to life by literalism, and supplied by 
modern theology with the clothing of historical 
science." 

2. The Pauline conception of Jesus is that of a 
heavenly Christ who became incarnate because of 



Io6 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

the love of God, who died as a sacrifice and was raised 
from the dead, who already exercises his control 
over his community, who sends the Holy Spirit to the 
followers, and who will return from heaven to estab- 
lish his kingdom. 

It cannot be questioned that this Pauline concep- 
tion of Jesus differs somewhat from Jesus' own esti- 
mate of himself as recorded in our gospels, but it is 
rather in the manner of a developed interpretation 
than of a radically different estimate. It starts 
with the messianic valuation, and presupposes a 
knowledge of the historical Jesus. The Pauline let- 
ters were without exception written to persons who 
already had in their possession the elements, at least, 
of our Synoptic Gospels. His effort was not so much, 
therefore, to set forth the facts of Jesus' life as to show 
how an already existing faith in Jesus could shape 
itself to the exegencies of actual situations. Wher- 
ever he finds it necessary to refer to matters which lie 
within the range of the synoptic material, it is only a 
hypersensitive criticism which can discover radical 
discrepancies. Paul's God is the same Heavenly 
Father whom Jesus revealed. To Him as reconciled 
Jesus leads men, and in the great consummation 
He will be all in all. Paul's elaboration of the signifi- 
cance of Jesus, though enriched by his own experi- 



JESUS THE CHRIST I07 

ence and culture, is steadily along the line of Jesus' 
own estimate of himself as the revelation of God's 
power of spiritual salvation in terms of messiah- 
ship. 

The world of scholarship at the present time is 
deeply concerned in the comparison of the Jesus of 
Paul with the Jesus of the synoptists. This brief 
statement will indicate that, in my opinion, despite 
their differences, the two are fundamentally the 
same, the differences in portrayal being due to the 
method of exposition and the momentary exigencies 
of the apostle's thought. Indeed, after a careful ex- 
amination of the facts in the case, I am inclined to go 
farther and to say that the man who wishes to under- 
stand the significance of Jesus cannot do better than 
to face Paul's problems and find in Jesus his own 
answers thereto. 

3. Even more pronounced discrepancies have been 
found between the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel and the 
Jesus of the synoptists. But a dispassionate exami- 
nation will show that these differences lie again in the 
region of interpretation. There are no significant 
details of the life of Jesus given in the Johannine 
writings that are not already to be found, at least 
in kind, in the Synoptic Gospels. True, the Prologue 
of the Fourth Gospel introduces the Logos doctrine, 



Io8 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

but it is a valuation of Jesus that can be traced 
only with difficulty throughout the gospel as a whole. 
The persistent valuation there is again messianic. 
The chronology, also, of the messianic revelation is 
not that of the synoptists, but when we are quite 
assured as to the proper order of the Johannine 
material, it is altogether probable that most of these 
difficulties will disappear. If one allows for the 
practical and apologetic use which the Fourth Gospel 
makes of the facts of Jesus' career, he will find in it 
precisely the same elements that are to be found in the 
synoptics. True, the line of demarcation between 
fact and interpretation is in many places impossible 
to draw, and the portrayal of Jesus in the Fourth 
Gospel is theological and religious rather than baldly 
biographical; but the real Jesus is there as well 
as the author's comment, explanation, and valua- 
tion. 

To such conclusions as this, despite its eddies, the 
main current of modern scholarship with its explora- 
tion of the consciousness of Jesus, its analysis of the 
religious experience of his first interpreters, and its 
insistence on historical rather than dogmatic pro- 
cedure, seems to me to be moving. Varieties of inter- 
pretative details are undeniably in the New Testa- 
ment, but they are interpretations that radiate from 



JESUS THE CHRIST I09 

the same historical center. If one starts with inci- 
dental statements and unique analogies, it is easy 
enough to find in the New Testament only more or 
less discordant descriptions of Jesus. If, because of 
temperament or presupposition, one prefers differ- 
ences to agreements, these discordant descriptions 
will seem antagonistic. But if one starts with Jesus 
and his own estimate of himself as included in the 
oldest materials of the gospels, it is possible to see 
how Christian experience in making real to itself 
the value of that supreme person could use all these 
figures and valuations, and yet cherish the Figure 
himself unchanged. The unity of a circle lies at the 
point from which the radii emerge rather than in some 
point in the circumference which for the moment 
attracts one's attention. In the case of the New 
Testament that center is the historical Jesus of the 
sources interpreted as the Christ — the one whom 
God had empowered by His own resident spirit to 
be a Saviour. 

in 

The relation of any creative personality to the 
movement which it inaugurates is always compli- 
cated. In some cases the founder of a religion be- 
comes the controlling factor of its entire history. 
His words become a veritable law which it is sacrilege 



no THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

to break. In other cases the movement sweeps 
away from its founder, and takes up into itself such 
various elements as to become quite other than that 
originally intended. In still other cases the founder 
of a religion disappears historically, and the reli- 
gion that bears his name is in utter ignorance as to 
his personality. In no religion except Christianity, 
however, unless it be Buddhism, is the personality, 
as distinguished from the teachings of its founder, 
of actual religious value. Even Mahomet is only the 
Prophet of Allah. 

Christianity is here unique in that it has always 
made the personal experience of Jesus its center. 
The teaching of the church has emphasized the facts 
rather than the teaching of Jesus. Take from 
Christian theology the person, the death, and the 
resurrection of Jesus, and there would not be much 
Christian theology left. True, at the present time 
Protestantism is complementing its emphasis upon 
these historical aspects with the ideals set forth in the 
gospel, which are, to a considerable extent at least, 
independent of historical episodes in the life of Jesus. 
Indeed, it must be added that there is a tendency, by 
no means weak, to dehistoricalize Christianity alto- 
gether and make it into a religious philosophy as 
indifferent to the historical Christ as Zoroastrianism 



JESUS THE CHRIST III 

is to Zarathustra. But, as I shall repeatedly insist, 
such a procedure is to create a different sort of reli- 
gion from the Christianity the centuries have known, 
and, in its efforts to avoid the Scylla of higher criticism, 
is sure to fall into the grip of the Charybdis of 
philosophy. If Christianity is to possess genuinely 
religious power, it must remain true to the gospel 
which makes the historical personality of Jesus an 
actual contribution to religious history. 

The gospel, however, is not simply a biography. 
Merely to believe that Jesus existed is not to have 
religious faith. It is conceivable that he might have 
lived in Nazareth or some obscure city of Ephraim 
and been all that he was as far as his personal ex- 
perience of God is concerned, and yet have been of no 
religious significance. If, then, some search of an- 
cient records had found that he thus lived, one could, 
in the scientific spirit, assent to the fact, and yet re- 
main in such ignorance as to his real significance as 
to see in him simply a footnote of religious history. 
The real significance of the historical Jesus lies in the 
fact that in him the Spiritual Life for which humanity 
has searched was perfectly brought in terms of time 
and human relationships. He is more, even, than a 
mere example ; he is a datum for religious induction 
as truly as the earthworms studied by Darwin were 



112 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

data for the exposition of the laws of life. In him 
we have demonstrated the power of that spiritual life 
to triumph over sin and death. Despite the jeers of 
the crowds at the cross, the deliverance about which 
Jesus talked was actually accomplished in his own 
life. Deprived of its knowledge of this, as it were, 
successful experiment in the spiritual life, the gospel 
becomes simply an ideal which stands over against the 
real world of human endeavor in much the same 
way as the Platonic world of ideas stands over against 
the world of experience. 

But this is not to exhaust the content of the signifi- 
cance of the Jesus of history. He is not simply a 
datum to be treated as independent of the Christian 
community. Darwin's earthworm was not the 
founder of evolution. Jesus was the founder of 
Christianity. And he founded it as something 
more than a teacher. His paramount place in his- 
tory was given him by those who loved him, saw 
in him God's Messiah, and followed him and his 
teachings as they would follow the veritable God 
Himself, to the death. The Jesus of history became 
the Christ of experience. Personal love of a histor- 
ical character was transformed into religious faith in 
him as more than a person in history. 

In this Jesus shared in our common lot. A man 



JESUS THE CHRIST II3 

can be a teacher only when some one is taught, a 
leader only when there are those who are led. Soc- 
rates without Plato would not have been the Soc- 
rates centuries have honored. Jesus the historical 
person of Galilee and Jerusalem became the Saviour 
of the centuries as he became the Christ of the 
Christian community. That is to say, as he evoked 
faith in himself as the divine Saviour. 

We are accustomed to the discussion as to whether 
the ''Christ of experience" is the Jesus of history. 
The distinction, as has already been implied, is, with 
proper limitations, legitimate. But there is need here 
of clear thinking. Analysis discovers several " Christs 
of experience. " There are : the Jesus who lies behind 
the earliest documents of Christianity; the Messiah 
of the completed New Testament literature; the 
metaphysical Son of God, the incarnation of the 
Logos of the creeds and the theologians; the "es- 
sential" Christ found by moderns in history and 
Christian experience and worshiped by the church 
as God, all but detached from the original Jesus. 
With which of these concentric personal ideals of the 
spiritual life can the modem man concern himself ? 

To an extent at first unrealized, with them all. 
But he is to keep central the Jesus of history. Then 
as he recapitulates, as it were, in his own experience 



114 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

that development of definitions and values of Jesus 
which has marked the faith of the church does he 
come to see that, to use Wenley's terms, the historical 
Jesus who was is the metahistorical Christ who is. 
If his starting point be the Jesus of the sources and if 
his attitude be religiously sympathetic, his valuation 
will proceed along the line followed by the first dis- 
ciples. Jesus will himself compel his acceptance as 
the divine Saviour, and the modern man's Credo will, 
to that extent at least, be the equivalent of that of 
the Christian community of all ages. 

I. Fortunately we can recover the essential content 
of the first confession of faith in Jesus as Christ. 
It was not a merely formal definition. In ascribing 
to Jesus the messianic dignity, the apostles and their 
converts were using a well-recognized term of value 
that implied rather than presupposed a metaphysical 
estimate of his person. The historical and compara- 
tive study so characteristic of recent years gives us 
the content with some precision. The apocalypses, 
the sayings of the rabbis, the expectations of the 
masses, notwithstanding their differences, are here at 
one. The Christ was to be more than a popular 
hero; he was to be more than a conqueror. As has 
already been said, he was to be the one whom God's 
Spirit empowered to save His people. That is the 



JESUS THE CHRIST II5 

very heart of the messianic hope that among the Jews 
reached its most perfect expression in the Seventeenth 
Psalm of Solomon. Its elements are there clear: 
the presence through unction (or, as the Greek would 
say, incarnation) of God in a human individual; 
and the sinless character and redemptive office 
and power given that individual by such divine 
presence. This deliverance to be accomplished was 
described sometimes in terms of ordinary politics, 
sometimes in terms of catastrophe; but it always 
implied moral elements. The new Israel was to be 
imperial because it was to be composed of ''sons of 
God," a "holy people." "The tribes shall be 
sanctified;" "in holiness shall he lead them all, and 
there shall no pride be among them that any should 
be oppressed" — this was the noblest hope of Phari- 
saism. A Christ that did not save the righteous would 
be the Antichrist. 

And these elements we find in the messianic title 
the early Christians gave their Master. With it 
they doubtless transferred also their inherited 
beliefs as to preexistence and origin, but Paulinism 
no more than Judaism centered about such quasi- 
metaphysical conceptions. Spiritual life, goodness, 
power to bring individual and social salvation, through 
the resident Spirit of God, these are the central 



Il6 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

elements of the messianic valuation wherever found 
in the New Testament. It was because the historical 
Jesus actually was believed by his immediate friends 
to possess these characteristics that the messianic 
title was given him. That is their persistent and 
unanimous Christology. And these characteristics the 
modern man also can discover in the historical Jesus 
and in the Jesus who has worked in history. Age 
after age has sought to express its estimate of his 
redemptive power in its own equivalent of the messi- 
anic description. The resulting definitions have not 
always been regarded as such equivalents, and the 
development of authoritative ecclesiastical dogma 
has sometimes obscured their functional office. But 
here again historical insight should enable the mod- 
ern man to perceive the continuous spiritual content 
rather than divergent concepts in theological valua- 
tion. Discovering it, be his metaphysical formula 
what it may, he knows Jesus as the revelation of a 
redemptive God, and in his own terms expresses his 
own equivalent for that eternal power of Jesus to 
elevate and deepen the spiritual life which the early 
Christians described as messianic. 

2. From this point of view the modern man can 
appreciate and, in the equivalent terms of his own 
thinking, can derive help from the evangelic estimate 



JESUS THE CHRIST II7 

of the holy life of Jesus. That, too, is implied by the 
messianic valuation in terms of superhuman spiritual 
life as it was revealed in the field of morals. 

In the same proportion as we know what sin is do 
we know what righteousness is. The older world to 
whom sin meant something static or negative or even 
substantial could discuss as to whether Jesus could 
not or did not sin. To the modern man such a ques- 
tion's all but unintelligible. Morality is not quanti- 
tative. It is a relation of the individual to his 
situation, a matter of social adjustment rather than 
of absolute standards, however true it may be that 
righteousness as an attitude of soul is timeless. 
Actions are not good ; a man is good. Moral struggle 
which we see so clearly on the pages of the gospel rec- 
ords of Jesus is only what would be expected of spir- 
itual life marked by moral perfection. New duties 
came to Jesus with the same interrogation as that with 
which they come to all men. In him as in all human- 
ity there was the struggle between the spiritual and 
the physical elements of personality. In the wilder- 
ness when he faced his own ideals, by the lake side 
when men would make him king, on the mountain 
side when Peter urged him to choose the lower idea 
of messiahship, in Gethsemane when the apparent 
unrighteousness of defeat tempted him to escape, 



Il8 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

and on the cross when the awful doubt of God's own 
goodness beset him, Jesus faced genuinely moral is- 
sues. And there is yet to be shown any clear evidence 
that he ever chose the secondary in preference to the 
supreme good. The spiritual always was supreme. 
Prescientific views of nature, to some measure at least, 
he seems to have shared with the men of his day ; but 
his moral decisions were infallible. He was sinless. 
He, rather than his teaching, is our final standard of 
the moral life. And what is even more, his perfec- 
tion has revealed that the spiritual life can triumph in 
the moral field. 

So at least the heart of humanity as a whole has 
testified. Those who have questioned the ethic of 
Jesus have in reality charged him v/ith not agreeing 
with their own theories of right. He who sees in 
Jesus one genetically related with the process in which 
our race is involved can see how in truth he was sub- 
ject to the backward pull of humanity, how he could 
be tempted in all points like as we, and yet be without 
sin. For temptations may spring from the tendency of 
a good to dominate a life to which it has contributed 
and by which it has been outgrown, or they may 
spring from without in the form of some suggestion 
to unworthy action made by an individual (like Peter 
at Philippi) or a society (like Pharisaism as an aggres- 



JESUS THE CHRIST IIQ 

sive institution) not under the domination of the 
same high ideals of him to whom it is made. 

We find here one of those contradictions that still 
further set Jesus apart from all those who have lived 
the life of the spirit. Not only have we no record of 
his having yielded to temptation, but we have no 
record of his ever having used in his teaching any 
experience of repentance and forgiveness. Had 
Jesus possessed the remembrance of such experience, 
we should indubitably have had from him, with his 
pellucid honesty and hatred of hypocrisy, some word 
as to the peace which follows the consciousness of 
forgiveness. Even less absolutely honest men like 
Augustine and Pascal abound in such consciousness, 
and with Paul it is central. This silence is his own 
greatest testimony to his own sense of moral perfec- 
tion. And, what is an almost equal marvel, men never 
read such forgiveness between the lines of his call 
to repentance. 

Yet the sinlessness of Jesus was not a negative 
quantity. He did not merely keep himself from 
doing that which was wicked; he was no moral 
valetudinarian kept from sin by a removal from the 
world of actual endeavor. The sinlessness of Jesus 
was positive. He kept from doing wrong by doing 
right. In him spiritual life reached moral perfection 



I20 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

as it expressed itself in love. Because of this supreme 
fact the gospel is again more than a philosophy. Its 
message of the way of salvation is not that of teach- 
ing which, like Buddhism, bids men kill desire. The 
perfect spiritual life of Jesus expressed itself in actual 
historical social relations. That is one reason why 
he has always so appealed to life. In the same pro- 
portion as men have made him an abstract doctrine, 
be it never so precisely formulated, his power over 
human hearts has wavered. Those have gained 
most from him who have become as it were little 
children, seeing in him help rather than a problem. 
He dealt not with universals, but with the universal 
as conditioned by the exigencies of actual life. The 
spirit of the Lord was upon him to strengthen him to 
such homely deliverance as giving sight to the blind, 
hearing to the deaf, the gospel to the poor. 

"And so the Word had breath, and wrought 
With human hands the creed of creeds 
In loveliness of perfect deeds, 
More strong than all poetic thought." 

In this exposition we see not merely a perfect life, 
but we see the type of the perfect life. For in the life 
of love which Jesus lived even to the sacrifice of 
Calvary, we see the quality and the content of the 
life of the spirit. That is the real meaning of sinless- 



JESUS THE CHRIST 121 

ness. Spirituality consists in love. To be perfect 
like God is to be loving like Jesus. The spiritual life 
seeks not poverty but wealth of self-expression. 
*'I came," said Jesus, in that marvelous verse of the 
Fourth Gospel : " that they may have life and may 
have it abundantly." 

This social content of the spiritual life it is that 
gives Jesus his supreme position among the founders 
of religions. Moral perfection must come to others 
as it came to him through the expression of the life 
of the spirit in ordinary human surroundings. His 
followers were not to be taken from the world. As- 
ceticism, self-depreciation, abnormality in any form, 
are no part of spiritual living. To be like Jesus a 
man must not withdraw from life; he must plunge 
into life. But in so doing he must maintain the 
perspective of values which Jesus himself maintained. 
Only thus can he approximate that perfection which 
on its negative side is sinlessness and on its positive 
side is self-sacrificing, loving service to one's world. 

3. Yet moral perfection is not the greatest and 
most vital quality men have seen in Jesus. They have 
not only admired, they have worshiped him, and have 
been saved by him. Through faith in himself he 
evokes the spiritual life and compels its allegiance. 
We are not now speaking metaphysically, but simply 



122 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

historically. Doubt or explain such faith by what- 
ever psychology or philosophy one prefers, the fact 
remains. Men have found the salvation of God in 
him. 

It could not be otherwise if he were what he be- 
lieved himself to be. In the light of the history of the 
term, to be the Christ meant to Jesus that God was 
present in his person as the source of his redemptive 
power. It is confidence in this estimate — an esti- 
mate which was the property of Jesus as truly as of his 
first interpreters, — that lies back of the emphasis 
which historical orthodoxy placed upon Jesus as the 
Son of God. The doctrine of the Trinity, although 
it sprang in part from the irrepressible tendencies of 
Greek Christians toward metaphysics, when formu- 
lated in the creeds of Nicaea and Constantinople, 
was really the outcome of a sense of the need of a 
divine redemption for sinful man. That very shibbo- 
leth of orthodoxy, the word '' consubstantial," was 
something more than a term of mere metaphysics. 
Employed as it was because it expressed not so 
much what the Athanasians believed as what the 
Arians did not believe, it gives no support to the 
charge that the Christians of the fourth and fifth 
centuries were fighting over a diphthong. The real 
issue was whether the redemption actually experienced 



JESUS THE CHRIST 1 23 

by those who had believed in Jesus was wrought by 
God or by some being neither man, God, nor angel. 
From the point of view of that sort of logic which 
cleverly disembowels conclusions from major prem- 
ises, the arguments against which Athanasius and 
the Western world contended are unanswerable. But 
the trinitarian formula was something more than a 
speculation as to the nature of the Godhead before the 
birth of Jesus. It was an attempt to express a final 
judgment of value in terms of metaphysics. A divine 
salvation argued a divine Saviour. That for which 
Athanasius stood could not be expressed accurately 
in any term at his disposal. The difficulty with 
the entire discussion lay in its attempt to deal with 
ultimate terms, and ultimate terms cannot be defined. 
But the significance of God can be expressed by 
symbols, and His nature in some way pictured by 
combining terms which can neither be taken with 
scientific accuracy nor combined in a precise result- 
ant. That is exactly what men claimed when they 
talked about the " eternal begetting of the Son'' and 
of his " consubstantiality " with the Father. Tech- 
nical descriptions of God in the terms of Sabellius 
and Arius are undoubtedly more intelligible, logi- 
cally speaking, than are the formulas of the Nicene 
creed. But their very intelligibility is an argument 



124 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

against them. Their precision of definition is 
gained by the exclusion of values. 

And, unless I altogether mistake, the modern 
man with his presupposition as to the immanence 
of the Spiritual Life, or, as the Greeks called it, 
the Logos, and his growing knowledge that truth can- 
not be reduced to deductive syllogisms, will, if only 
he will use words not too rigorously, unexpectedly 
find himself in sympathy with the Nicene formula as 
that which on the whole best expresses in the terms of 
*' essence" philosophy the value which his own reli- 
gious nature finds in the Jesus of the gospel, who was 
the Christ of Paul. True, he is more interested in the 
historical ''person" than in metaphysical "natures," 
but a Jesus who is a teacher about God is of vastly 
different worth to humanity than a Christ who, like 
the bit of carbon blazing with the electric current, 
is an individual made incandescent by the actual 
presence of God, the immanent Spiritual Life upon 
which our own spiritual life rests. Many questions 
as to the person of Jesus must be held open as long as 
they wait upon the researches of honest criticism, 
but they cannot invalidate the conviction that, how- 
ever feeble and inadequate our vocabularies may be, 
we have in Jesus God redemptively revealed in an in- 
dividual personality. The modern man has assured 



JESUS THE CHRIST 1 25 

himself that Jesus is man of very man, but in his 
surrender to him through faith, he will be restless 
until he also feels in him God of very God. And 
however he reaches this conclusion, whether it be 
through the high altitudes of discussion as to the 
nature of the Logos, or, distrusting all metaphysics, 
through a Thomas-like surrender to the historical 
Jesus, he finds in it a satisfaction of his deepest spir- 
itual needs. 

The Christian salvation has thus become an ele- 
ment of the experience of the centuries. Jesus is the 
one person to whom we can look with religious faith. 
Plato and Socrates and Gotama Buddha are among 
our teachers; but Western civilization, waiving all 
questions as to his metaphysical deity, worships 
Jesus as the only person who can bring to its members 
and to itself a sense of divine forgiveness and an 
experience of regeneration. 

4. Such a miracle — for what other word pictures 
the situation ? — in the range of spiritual experience 
inevitably forces the modem man, if only he will 
think long enough, into essential harmony with 
the evangelic conception of Jesus' messianic per- 
sonality. He himself becomes a miracle. Miracu- 
lous, let us hasten to say, not in the sense that there 
is in him any violation of the constructive laws of 



126 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

nature, but miraculous in the sense that in him spirit- 
ual experience finds an exception in terms of perfec- 
tion. Jesus was not apart from humanity. To 
doubt that was as hateful a heresy to the fathers of 
orthodoxy as to doubt his deity. He lived subject 
to the conditions which control the relations of the 
individual in any given historic&<l environment. But 
in him those relations were perfectly maintained in 
terms of freedom possible only to the divine will. 
If God were to have become individualized in the 
historical situation set by the Judaism of the first 
century of our era, we believe he would have lived 
as Jesus lived. But such way of living, this quality 
of the spiritual personality as exhibited in social 
relations, is independent of peculiarities in the histori- 
cal conditions. That Jesus spoke Aramaic was, as 
the schoolmen might say, an accident; that he was 
God incarnate and revealed is a matter of everlasting 
significance. History here reaches over into religion, 
not as furnishing a bewildering exception in. the 
spiritual order, but as presenting a perfect and im- 
pelling exposition of that order. As Jesus himself 
said, he was the Son of Man, the exposition in terms 
of an historical situation of those timeless values 
that shall characterize the kingdom of God. 
5. But the gospel is not content to leave Jesus a sort 



JESUS THE CHRIST I27 

of lay figure to be clothed with the ideals of humanity. 
To use the language of the schools, it conceives of 
him in terms of existence as truly as in terms of values. 
It never elaborates metaphysically the problems of his 
person, but it has its Christologies none the less. 
For in the exposition of his person as set forth by the 
writers of the New Testament at least four expositions 
of his person are given. 

There is, first, the conception of unction which is in 
all four of the gospels ; that is to say, the coming of the 
Holy Spirit upon him at the baptism. The difference 
between such experience and that of others is sharply 
defined in the gospels. It differed from that of the 
prophets by reason of its permanence. The Holy 
Spirit abode in him. The difference between his and 
the spiritual experience of the Christian believer is 
that between the perfect and the imperfect, and even 
more the difference in function. The Holy Spirit em- 
powered him to save; it empowered others to be 
saved. The Holy Spirit is repeatedly said by Paul 
and by Jesus himself to work in both Jesus and 
those who accept him as the Christ. But in the 
latter case his work is to lead men into all truth 
by taking and revealing to them the things of 
Christ. 

Second, there is the concept of Paul of the incama- 



128 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

tion in Jesus of the preexistent Christ. Just how 
this incarnation was accomplished Paul does not 
speak unless it be in the great passage of Philippians 
in which the Christ is said to have emptied himself 
and to have taken upon himself the form of a servant, 
becoming in the likeness of man. Such a view ap- 
parently presupposes the current Jewish belief of 
preexistence of souls, and from that point of view is 
perfectly intelligible. A doctrine of a merely ideal 
preexistence of the Christ in my judgment cannot be 
established from the study of pre-Christian Jewish 
thought. Every soul was held to be preexistent, and 
at the moment of conception was conducted by the 
angel who had it in charge from the treasure house 
under the throne of God to its human embryo. 
From such a point of view it was not difhcult to con- 
ceive of the Christ as having preexisted as the Christ 
and to have been brought into a human body. 

In the third place there is the conception of the 
Logos who became flesh. It has only one clear ex- 
pression in the New Testament, namely, in the Pro- 
logue in the Gospel according to John. In many 
ways, however, the Logos conception was the Greek 
equivalent of the Pauline conception of the prehis- 
toric Christ. As a Christian doctrine it differs from 
that of Philo in that the incarnate Logos was a 



JESUS THE CHRIST 129 

means of bringing man and God together, instead of 
keeping them, as it were, apart. 

The word is the means of self-revelation; so the 
Logos or Eternal Word was the self-revealing aspect 
of the personality of God, who found self-expression 
in the individual Jesus. So consonant is this con- 
ception with the entire trend of Greek thought under 
the influence of which the gospel became a theology, 
that it naturally became the controlling element of 
Christology and gave rise to the first ecumenical 
creed. That creed, it is worth noticing, however, 
was not concerned with the person of the historic 
Jesus, but with the relations of the prehistoric, 
eternal Logos with God the Father. Christological 
discussions prior to the Arian controversy were con- 
cerned primarily with the question as to whether the 
Logos had an actual human body. 

Finally, there is the explanation of the person of 
Jesus through the Virgin Birth as narrated in the 
opening sections of Matthew and Luke. Nowhere 
else in the New Testament is there any reference to 
such birth, although there are a number of passages 
which are not inconsistent with such a belief. It is 
not a part of the gospel either of Mark or of John, and 
is omitted in the Pauline formulation of the gospel 
as found in i Corinthians, chapter 15; it is not in 



130 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

the list of the "principles" given in the Epistle to 
the Hebrews. It is to be found in the oldest manu- 
script of the gospel which has reached us, the Sinaitic 
Syriac version, but at the same time it is there ex- 
pressly said that Joseph begot Jesus. It first appears 
in Christian theology in Ignatius, where, however, 
it is referred to as a currently accepted article of 
Christian faith. 

The attitude of many modem New Testament 
scholars toward the Virgin Birth is one of unhesi- 
tating rejection. Even in the case of men who are 
not swayed by any anti-miraculous prejudices the 
evidence that the infancy sections were parts of the 
original gospel are judged to be not wholly satisfac- 
tory. Hardly sufficient weight, however, has been 
given to the argument for the pre-Christian character 
of the messianic prophecy found in the songs of 
Mary and Zacharias. If the sections as a whole were 
invented by the later Christians in order to explain 
the messianic formula of the Son of God, it is difficult 
to see why these messianic descriptions, so admir- 
ably expressing the religious conditions under which 
they are said to have been given, should not have 
been rewritten. This is true of much other Jewish 
material, like the Apocalypses of Baruch and Fourth 
Esdras, where Jewish material was appropriated by 



JESUS THE CHRIST I3I 

the early church. On the other hand, the argument 
that is sometimes so passionately urged that without 
the infancy sections Jesus would be a bastard is faulty 
in that it disregards the fact that if the sections 
should be shown to be later additions of the Christian 
church the entire story of his birth disappears. 

The tendency of the more conservative modem 
theologians is towards an apologetic position. 
Whether or not the infancy stories shall survive the 
test of criticism now in progress, the messianic per- 
son of Jesus as it stands revealed in the entire New 
Testament literature is unaffected. On all sides it is 
agreed that the disciples accepted him as the Christ 
without any knowledge of the Virgin Birth. Paulin- 
ism radiates not from the manger but from the cross 
and the tomb. If these sections should ever be re- 
jected by theologians as a whole I cannot see that 
there would be any vital change made in the evangeli- 
cal message. The Nicaean formula, with its philoso- 
phy of the two natures, would have to be replaced by 
others which would utilize other concepts to express 
the idea of the incarnation of the deity, but that is 
already necessary in any case for those who have re- 
jected the " essence" philosophy of the Greek schools. 
It is not too much to say that already in modem the- 
ology belief in the deity of Christ does not rise and fall 



132 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

with the historicity of the infancy sections. The 
modern man who has found Jesus a Saviour can 
await without apprehension the final decision of his- 
torical criticism as to their origin and historical value. 
In any case he has the Christ of Paul. 

It should not be overlooked, however, that there is 
a common element running through all four of these 
explanations of the superhuman person of Jesus. 
In them all he is said to be the embodiment and the 
expression of God's Spirit. The Logos doctrine is 
only an equivalent way of expressing this fact; the 
Holy Spirit came upon him at his baptism; his pre- 
existent personality was anointed so that he was the 
Christ; and that which was born of Mary was said 
to be due to the working of the Holy Spirit. And in 
this common element of Christology the modem man 
finds his approach to the philosophy of the person of 
Jesus; for he recognizes in it the persistent element 
which different Christologies have attempted to 
express. He seeks in his own thought some equiva- 
lent concept that shall make real and effective that 
which the heart of humanity has already accepted as 
final, namely, that God is in Christ reconciling the 
world to Himself. 

For he cannot fail to see that a divine person is 
demanded to account for divine influence. While 



JESUS THE CHRIST I33 

the modem man may well hesitate to attempt to rein- 
troduce the Hellenistic discussions over the formulas 
of the metaphysical deity of the incarnate Logos, 
whoever recognizes the relationship of mind and 
body knows that spiritual strength presupposes 
something very close to that which the first masters 
of theology called "substance" and "nature." 
True, their philosophy and trichotomous psychology, 
their distinctions between "essence" and "persons," 
their theories of personality that made duality of 
nature and will consistent with unity of person, have 
passed ; but that which they intended to express the 
religious man with historical intuition will feel is true. 
The formula of Chalcedon itself in effect forbids a 
too rigorous philosophy as to the way in which the 
Logos and man became one Person in Jesus. Despite 
all warnings humanity will make its adventurous 
metaphysical definition of the Person who compels 
such supreme valuations. Worth is obverse of 
being. There must be energy in Jesus sufficient to 
evoke his valuation as God. Shakespeare in the 
world of poets was bom a Shakespeare capable of 
winning the world's admiration as a supreme poet. 
Jesus, the embodiment of a saving God, must have 
been bom a potential Saviour. Although there are as 
yet open questions conceming the historicity of the 



134 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

stories of the Virgin Birth, a man does not need to 
withhold rehgious faith in Jesus until they are an- 
swered. He stumbles as he tries to understand 
some of the Pauline descriptions of a preexistent 
Messiah not yet incarnate, and like Paul and the 
makers of the original Nicene creed, he may be con- 
tent with a simple formula of incarnation ; with his 
growing perplexity over the relation of God and the 
individual, of brain and thought, like the makers of 
the Chalcedonian creed, he may hesitate to commit 
himself to any psychological explanation of the per- 
son of Jesus the Christ. But this he knows : morality 
is ultimately an expression of the energies, the quality 
of being. A divine salvation demands a divine 
Saviour. If action and character are the outgrowth of 
preceding and conditioning activities, he cannot stop 
his search for the source of the experience of Jesus 
with the baptism or with his filial words to Mary in the 
temple. With the recollection of Jesus' own self- 
estimate and of his triumphs over those temptations 
to which humanity as humanity is liable, his knowl- 
edge of physiological psychology with its insistence 
upon the genetic development of personality forces 
him back to the manger, there to find new meaning 
in those words to Mary: "That which is born shall 
be called holy, the son of God." Whatever a man 



JESUS THE CHRIST I35 

may hold as to the Virgin Birth, in all reverence may 
he say, that what the God-man Jesus was among 
men, the unborn Jesus was among the unborn. 
For the Spiritual Life of the Universe, that God 
whom Jesus reveals, even in the mystery of his 
conception must have touched humanity. 

IV 

Such an equivalency of the doctrinal interpreta- 
tions of Jesus may meet with small response from 
those who, preferring loyalty to undefinable terms, 
cannot see judgments of value behind metaphysical 
formulas, and prefer to let differences of terminology 
obscure the common substance of faith. Still less 
will it find acceptance from those who see in Jesus 
only a hypersensitive, ecstatic temperament working 
under the suggestion of a current eschatology, to 
whom the first disciples attached their messianic 
hopes. But Jesus' cautious use of the figures of the 
apocalypses can serve as the basis of no such hy- 
pothesis. Again we can trust the common sense of the 
modern man. Ecstatics he knows, and alternating 
personalities, but who is this child of a too-ingenious 
religions geschichtUche method and a pathological psy- 
chology, who is also the example and saviorof a world ? 

At all events, no man can deny that Jesus has been 



136 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

a Savior. To express that fact is the real purpose of 
every Christology. All our philosophies and all our 
shibboleths cannot obscure or add to this supreme 
fact. Because of this, men whose response to him has 
brought freedom and peace and moral power, avoid 
calling him more than teacher or prophet only by 
the over-cautious denial of the instinctive response of 
their spiritual life to the Spiritual Life they find in 
him. If Jesus has the value of God to the believer, 
then either that judgment is unjustifiable or Jesus 
actually possessed that which we may call deity. 
And if so, then why should we hesitate to confess him 
as divine and to trust him as divine and to expect 
from him works worthy of a Son of God ? 

In other words, just because of the messianic, that 
is to say the redemptive, worth and accomplishment 
of Jesus as seen in history and our own experience, 
we find our faith precipitating itself in a Credo by 
which we endeavor to make the Jesus of history 
redemptively intelligible to the spiritual life of others. 
We socialize our faith in words that at least symbolize 
it in descriptions of his Person. Again, though in the 
terminology of our modern world, we are at one with 
the Christian of the past. For the church, the body 
of believers, secretes its creeds as a living organism 
secretes its bony structure. To overstimulate the 



JESUS THE CHRIST I37 

process may mean death, but to stop it means death 
just as surely. The real office of formula is to help an 
age make the experience of salvation intelligible and 
consistently tenable. It is a social process in that it 
presupposes community in preconceptions and social 
experience. Thus it has been and must be with all 
definitions of Jesus. Their real purpose is practical 
efficiency. They have differed and must differ, 
as the social mind itself has changed. But the spir- 
itual content is the same. Authoritative Christology 
has risen through the efforts of deeply religious men to 
maintain scientifically or metaphysically both the God- 
value and the man- value of Jesus. A social mind per- 
meated with Greek thought debated as to the sonship 
of the Logos before time began, tried to formulate 
psychologically the relationship of the Logos to the 
human Jesus, and then, deciding that there were in 
Jesus two natures, queried if there were one will. 
These were the questions which the ecumenical 
councils attempted to answer in accordance with the 
aid of a philosophy that has disappeared except as it 
emerges in treatises on theology. Later centuries 
saw in Christ still other reflections of their controlling 
interests. To the Franks, as they went plundering 
through Gaul, he was the God of War. To the mediae- 
val lawyer, he was a feudal lord who gave church and 



138 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

state in fief. To mediaeval schoolmen he was a God 
who became incarnate to pay by his death the infi- 
nite debt due him by finite men. Among reformers 
he was the judge and the savior of those who trusted 
him. To men of to-day he is the immanent Spiritual 
Life of God focalized in a human personality. 

Fortunately a man does not need to be evangelically 
orthodox in order to be evangelical. There is many 
an honest soul who would not agree with my conclu- 
sions who would rival my personal loyalty to Jesus the 
Saviour. In religion, as in other phases of life, defini- 
tions are limitations in proportion as they are believed 
to be more than symbolic. The modern man is prop- 
erly impatient of theological shibboleths, as to what 
we believe about Jesus. For faith is not a defining of 
him in terms of being; it is the actually making of 
him, as he stands in the New Testament and later 
human experience, a working, controlling element in 
God-ward and man-ward self-expression. Faith 
precedes our attempts to justify its reasonableness. 
Its evidence is in experience, not in creedal subscrip- 
tion. And back of the kaleidoscope of creeds is the 
persistent experience of a regenerating, spiritual rec- 
onciliation with God mediated by the Jesus who the 
Christian community believes not only was but is 
the redemptive revelation of the immanent God. 



CHAPTER V 

THE LOVE OF THE GOD OF LAW 

The Christ must be a deliverer. But he can 
only deliver as mankind is convinced that God 
is like him — Love. 

*' Deliver us from evil." So Jesus taught his 
disciples to pray, and the petition is the same if 
we translate the Greek "Deliver us from the Evil 
One." For in the mind of the early Christians 
evil was the work of Satan. Deliverance from his 
kingdom is coordinate throughout the teaching of 
Jesus and his apostles with deliverance from sin 
and death. 

Just why physical evil is in the world humanity 
has never been quite able to discover. It is true 
that men of all ages have endeavored to extricate 
some sweetness from the bitter by an exposition 
of the educational value of suffering, and of all that 
misery which comes upon humanity from the physi- 
cal universe. The Hebrew prophet thought of 
labor itself as a curse which God brought upon men 

139 



140 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

because of sin, but even the Hebrews in the course 
of time came to see the blessing which comes to 
humanity from labor. Later philosophers have also 
taught us in the spirit of Brownmg to 

"Welcome each rebuff 
That turns earth's smoothness rough; 
Each sting that bids not sit nor stand but go! " 

But such philosophy even at its best has never 
quite satisfied us. Despite it there has always re- 
mained a haunting fear of a relentless nature, 
and from this fear has sprung that cry for help 
which is the very soul of religion itself. Human- 
ity is at one in the confession that in itself it is 
physically impotent in the presence of a universe 
that threatens at any moment to crush it. It may 
know itself superior to that universe, but such knowl- 
edge does not exclude suffering. We cannot find 
deliverance from impersonal force in anything im- 
personal. It can be ours only as we live in a 
spiritual order over which impersonal forces have 
no control. 

I 

I. It is from this point of view that one must 
come to that element of the gospel message that 
seems so remote to our age, — the deliverance from 
Satan. 



THE LOVE OF THE GOD OF LAW I4I 

The belief in Satan is one of the sturdiest at- 
tempts ever made by human reason to solve the 
great enigma as to how there can be a good God 
at the head of things and yet there be suffering 
throughout His world. Ancient religion, whether 
you find it in the uplands of Persia, the plains of 
Mesopotamia, the hills of Athens, the valley of 
Egypt, or the mountains of Judea, was dualistic. 
Either the gods themselves were subject to some 
implacable Fate or there were two gods, the good 
God and the bad God, Ahura-Mazda and Ahriman, 
Jehovah and Satan. The explanation was satis- 
factory for practical purposes. The good God was 
struggling with the bad God and would ultimately 
conquer him. But the good God was not in the 
world and the evil God was. The Jew and the 
early Christian believed that the prince of this 
world was Satan. He was to be judged, it is true, 
and his kingdom was to be overthrown and he 
himself was to be cast into the lake of fire; but in 
the present evil age he was, in the wisdom and in- 
scrutable providence of Jehovah, bringing misery. 
When he was conquered all those who were the 
loyal subjects of Jehovah would be delivered; but 
not till then. That was to be the beginning of the 
messianic bliss. 



142 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

Neither Persian nor Jew solved the problem which 
this explanation left unanswered, why such a rule of 
Satan could be permitted by the good God. It was 
enough for them to believe that it was, and that 
some day in the dim, glorious future it would be 
understood and all evil recompensed. It was this 
which called forth the sublimest heroism of the 
Hebrew prophets. They felt the misery of national 
collapse. They saw the chosen people of Jehovah 
oppressed rather than supreme; they saw them- 
selves the martyrs of the very people whom they 
would serve. Yet they disdained pessimism. The 
nation's suffering was vicarious; the servant of 
Jehovah was to heal others with his stripes, and in 
this faith they awaited the day when such deliver- 
ance as Jehovah might establish should appear. 

And it was an even greater deliverance the gospel 
foretold for all who followed Jesus' way. 

2. The problem of evil has been intensified rather 
than lessened by the growing conviction that God 
is immanent, for, if he be immanent, he is certain 
to be held responsible for the constitution of things 
as they are. The sad complex of sorrow and suffer- 
ing to which humanity is exposed has not only been 
permitted by him but in some way seems due to him. 
We are not content, for instance, to lay disease to 



THE LOVE OF THE GOD OF LAW 1 43 

devils. We see that it is the outcome of biological 
and chemical forces which are a part of the universe 
itself. And although few men are philosophers 
enough to understand Von Hartmann's view that 
the will of the Deity, in some dark way, sundered 
itself from the divine reason and thus made a world 
of misery, the tragic query of our day is, Can the 
God of Law be the God of Love ? 

II 

I. Possibly it might appear that a question 
prior to this might be, Can there be any God at all ? 
Materialism as represented by Haeckel would 
answer this with an emphatic negative. The uni- 
verse, indeed, is intelligible, but not personal. It 
has its two cosmic laws, constancy of matter and 
constancy of force, but there is no such thing as 
spirit either in man or in the universe. 

When such a view is set forth with a wealth of 
learning it is no easy task to attempt its refutation; 
and it is becoming generally admitted that a dem- 
onstration of the existence of God lies outside the 
region of pure metaphysics. Since the day of Kant 
our philosophy has been forced to admit that ulti- 
mate conceptions must be self-validating. It is in 
the realm of practical reason, as Kant would say, 



144 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

or, as we now prefer to say, in the spiritual order 
where values are timeless, that religion finds its 
real support. If we cannot metaphysically prove 
the existence of God, we can show that it is reason- 
able and helpful to believe in Him. Only in Him 
do we find the explanation of our own spiritual life 
that finds coherence and unity above time and 
change in the unrelated phenomena and the relent- 
less contradictions of impersonal nature. If there 
were more ultimate realities than God we should 
be able to demonstrate His existence. So much at 
least can be said for a pluralistic universe ! But 
as long as He Himself is ultimate we are estopped 
treating Him as less than ultimate. We can believe 
in Him only as we yield to the overwhelming sense 
of our need of Him, and to the spiritual life with its 
persistence of values that imply Him. Naturalism 
in all its forms gets its strength in the region of the 
intellect. Religion finds its seat in the spiritual 
region where we admit not only that a thing is, but 
that it is of practical value to us in helping us to a 
unity of self-expression and purpose. 

Nor are we shut out from legitimate arguments 
of another sort. Even materialism would hardly 
deny that there are relations between the various 
activities of the universe which are strikingly 



THE LOVE OF THE GOD OF LAW 1 45 

analogous to those which in human life imply pur- 
pose. There are those, it is true, who would insist 
that this is due to projection of our own experience 
into the physical universe and that there are changes 
but no goal. But the general drift of the evolution- 
ary thought is steadily along the line which makes 
ever easier interpretation of the universe in terms 
of spiritual teleology. And in the same proportion 
as purpose appears in the world are we justified in 
attributing that purpose to a resident Soul. At 
the very least the universe is such that it is suscep- 
tible to such interpretation as our own experience 
suggests; and it is axiomatic that the ultimate in- 
terpretation of the universe must include those 
activities which in ourselves we call personal. A 
universe that contains or — for the sake of argument 
— has produced thought and feeling and will can- 
not itself be said to give the lie to a belief in a cosmic 
Person working within our own external world, not 
reaching over into our universe and doing things 
from without. 

But materialism is by no means the source of the 
only opposition to this primary conception of the 
gospel that the God of Law is the God of Love. 
Agnosticism is a far more elusive and potent enemy, 
for it belongs to that dark region in which ignorance 



146 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

and knowledge so offset each other as to leave the 
mind in equipoise, or, what is more unfortunate, 
indifferent. Here, too, the really corrective argu- 
ment lies in the region of the practical quality of 
faith. For no man can quite rid himself of that 
irrepressible faculty. As Bishop Blougram argues : 

"All we have gained by one unbelief 
[s a life of doubt diversified by faith, 
For one of faith diversified by doubt: 
We called the chessboard white, — we call it black. 

Belief 

As unbelief before, shakes us by fits, 
Confounds us like its predecessor." 

Nothing could be truer, for, even granting that the 
metaphysical arguments for the existence of God 
equally balance, — a concession which I am very 
far from being ready to make — it still follows that 
a life working under a belief in God is, despite its 
moments of agonizing doubt, vastly more effective, 
constructive, peaceful, and healthy, than a life of 
negation which is tortured by moments of faith. 

2. Yet, after all, the question as to the existence 
of God is one with which the gospel is not pri- 
marily concerned. It assumes His existence. It 
never endeavors to persuade men that He is. It 
rather would convince them that this God, the very 
God of the cosmos, is one whose fundamental char- 



THE LOVE OF THE GOD OF LAW 1 47 

acter is love, whose closest earthly analogy is pa- 
rental. He is not Process, He is not God-idea. He 
is Father. 

But if he be a Father, how can there be misery and 
suffering and all the other brood of evil? It is no 
less a Christian than Augustine who cries, "What 
flood of eloquence would ever suffice to portray the 
tribulations of this life, to describe its wretchedness, 
which is, as it were, a kind of hell in our present 
existence ? " 

(i) A question like this which reaches down into 
the very depths of existence is not to be answered by 
a denial of the reality of the very conditions that 
set the problem. That is as confusing as it is naive. 
Since Schopenhauer there have been those who 
have attempted to cut the Gordian knot of philoso- 
phy by regarding the phenominal world as illusion. 
Such attempts are not always avowedly anti-Chris- 
tian. In the case of a system like that of Mrs. 
Eddy, an attempt is made to justify such illusion 
from the Bible itself. The fundamental premise 
of the gospel that God is Love is forced to give a 
conclusion which contradicts the generic experience 
and convictions of the race. Since God is Love no 
misery can be a reality. It is the creation of the 
"mortal mind." If one can down this "mortal 



148 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

mind" by an insistence upon the thought that God 
who is All is Love, misery will cease to exist. Therein 
lies emancipation ! 

There can be no doubt that psychologically it is 
possible to produce nervous reaction by the use of 
such a powerful suggestion as the evangelic view of 
God. Certain classes of cures wrought by Christian 
Science are too numerous to be denied. But men 
still die and earthquakes still ruin cities, and fires 
still lick up forests. The student of neurology in 
any case would be slow to admit that the effect 
produced by a suggestion of necessity guarantees 
the truth of the suggestion itself. How much less 
the philosophy from which the suggestion springs! 
That must be established by comparing it with the 
other things which we know. Why there should 
be a mortal mind capable of producing these delu- 
sions of evil is just as perplexing as the existence of 
Satan. 

(2) God can be regarded as Father only as He 
is seen to deliver men from a real world of evil. 
This deliverance, too, must not be something over 
against the world of law. In some way it must 
be correlated with process. Else there are two 
Gods: the God of nature and the God of grace. 
So the ancient Gnostics thought, and so must 



THE LOVE OF THE GOD OF LAW 1 49 

we think, unless that deliverance from evil which 
alone can make reasonable the Fatherliness of 
God is seen to be a part of a cosmic order in 
which there is room for both suffering and love. 
That is to say, we must see that deliverance of 
personalities is the final aim of the very cosmos 
that makes suffering inevitable. 

(3) The only genuinely Christian conception of 
deliverance from physical evil is that set by Jesus 
himself, viz. a spiritual life resting on the faith that 
there are greater values in the universe than those 
of chemistry and physics. Jesus himself was far- 
thest possible from denying the existence of evil 
from which God would deliver us. The age was 
indeed evil and would make his disciples its victims 
as surely as it made him. He practiced no auto- 
suggestion in order to make Gethsemane an illusion. 
The despair of the cross was as real as the cross it- 
self. There is too much at stake in the moral realm 
to risk training oneself to believe that non-existent 
the reality of which is witnessed by the totality of 
human experience. If the universe is not as satis- 
factory as we should like to have it, it is the only 
imiverse we have. To lose the capacity to face its 
mysteries with level eyes, is too high a price to pay 
for regaining one's health. 



150 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

3. The man who is in sympathy with the real 
science of the day will not ask that the universe be 
changed in order that he may escape sorrow; or 
that the nature from which sin springs shall be 
annihilated in order that he may be holy; or that 
death, which seems so integral a part of life, shall 
be abolished in order that he may preserve that 
individuality which is a man's greatest treasure; 
or that the forces of social evolution shall be changed 
in order that there may be established a society that 
shall be a fraternity. He knows that such demands 
involve the very structure of the universe in which 
he lives. The deliverance which he seeks is deliv- 
erance in accordance with the world of law, a freedom 
of soul that is born of spiritual growth and mastery. 
The modern man in his desire to be saved can only 
ask God to enable him, by faith and insight and 
divine assistance, to rise superior to the impersonal 
elements of the universe, to ally himself redemp- 
tively with the onward rush of that universe as it 
embodies the will of immanent Love. 

And he has abundant grounds to welcome the 
evangelic message of hope as yet unfulfilled. That, 
in the great process due to the operation of God's 
will which the ancient world described in terms of 
eschatology and the modern man expresses in 



THE LOVE OF THE GOD OF LAW I5I 

terms of evolution, there is something more than a 
blind succession of changes — that is the quintessence 
of the Christian view of the universe. Sorrow is 
the shadow of joy. The slow emergence of per- 
sonality from the husk of nature ; the steady growth 
of the individual as he gains new spiritual rights as 
over against physical forces; the sure, if sometimes 
woefully slow, transformation of the social body by 
the principles which have given worth to the indi- 
vidual; divine discontent with things as they are 
and persistent effort to make things as they should 
be; all these elementary facts of social history ar- 
gue the reasonableness of the faith in the reality of 
the good God of Jesus. If in view of the darker 
facts of life a Christian cannot be a thoroughgoing 
optimist, he has every reason for being a meliorist. 
He no longer fears the God of Law, for he not only 
believes that the evils which spring from nature 
are the inseparable concomitants of a process 
toward the better that proclaims the Father, — that 
as there could be no Better without a Worse, so 
there is no Worse without a Better, — but he also 
believes that he can himself, as a spiritual person 
strengthened and inspired by God, rise above the 
natural order in which change and suffering are 
implicit, into the freedom of the sons of God; into 



152 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

an eternal, not a temporal, order of existence ; out from 
the kingdom of Nature into the kingdom of God. 

In such an assurance, the modern man finds science 
an ally. Our physiologists and psychologists are 
already preaching something of the same gospel. 
Fear rather than intellectual doubt is the great 
enemy of humanity in their teaching as truly as in 
the teaching of Jesus. If faith in God revealed and 
interpreted by Jesus delivers us from the fear of 
those forces which seem so heartless, it is only 
corroboration when our physiological psychologists 
tell us that fear is a breeder of disease and that 
cheerfulness is the source of health. 

Further, both the gospel and the scientific disser- 
tation alike emphasize the supreme worth of per- 
sonality. To both alike the significance of a man 
lies not in what he is but in what he is becoming. 
Treatises on economics are hardly more than a 
commentary on the teaching of Jesus that a man 
can afford to give everything in exchange for his 
own life. Anthropology and the science of edu- 
cation point unwaveringly to the evolution of the 
free personality. Civilization might almost be 
described as society's constant lengthening of the 
chains which bind spiritual personality so closely 
to physical nature. 



THE LOVE OF THE GOD OF LAW 1 53 

To know the truth is indeed to be free. The 
very discontent and struggle which the gospel causes ; 
the very difficulties which beset the man who at- 
tempts to shape his life on the belief that love rather 
than force is supreme, are testimonies to the worth 
of the teaching. For, strange as it seems, such 
struggles bring peace and health and joy. To 
trust is to grow strong. To fear is to grow weak. 
To estimate the outer world as good and yet not the 
supreme good; to judge personality superior to the 
forces of nature; to dare lose one's life in order 
to save one's life, all this is as reasonable as its pur- 
suit is heroic. 

" Resolve to be thyself; and know that he 
Who finds himself, loses his misery 1 '* 

is the call of a greater than Matthew Arnold. 

Ill 

I. Yet, unless I mistake, it is here that the gospel 
meets its most intense enemy. There is no middle 
ground for an earnest man to take. If he has come to 
distrust the essential gospel of the spiritual life, he 
must become a neutral, unsympathetic observer of the 
world, or a pessimist, the terrified slave of physical 
nature. Nature and life themselves become evils. 
Von Hartmann, it is true, is not popular in America, 



154 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

but the pessimism which he rationalized is by no 
means foreign to our experience. "The future 
religion," he says in substance, "will be one whose 
substance is the renunciation of all life in the wholly 
blank and vague and limitless immensity which 
knows nothing of itself and which is so aberrant 
from its fundamental condition as to produce, 
contrary to its inherent nature, conscious beings who 
must suffer and wail, and agonize as long as they 
are conscious." Could words be in more complete 
contrast to the evangelic proclamation as to the 
goodness and love of God? Yet, stripped of the 
peculiar philosophy which lies back of it, the pes- 
simism of von Hartmann and of Schopenhauer 
before him, is shared by many a soul who looks out 
upon the catastrophies in nature and the inequali- 
ties of our social life; who knows in his own ex- 
perience the bitterness of sorrow, and who has found 
in every action results incommensurate with effort. 
Omar's distaste for the moral order as well as 
his sense of the awfulness of the non-moral evils 
of the world color much of our modern thinking. 

" Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspire 
To grasp the sorry Scheme of things entire, 
Would not we shatter it to bits — and then 
Remold it nearer to the Heart's Desire? " 



THE LOVE OF THE GOD OF LAW 155 

Pessimism springs not only from a disbelief in a 
good God; it springs quite as truly from a disbelief 
in the spiritual worth of man. The two are in- 
separable. Whoever distrusts God distrusts man ; 
and whoever distrusts man, unless he be inspired by 
the faith of the gospel, comes to distrust God. The 
outcome of such distrust, whether it be of God 
or of man, may not immediately disclose itself, but 
if the literature which imblushingly discloses the 
nakedness of so much of our modern world is any 
criterion, such results are sure to emerge. 

What man of us, looking out into the confused 
social order which we have inherited and which we 
strive often so desperately to better does not at 
times cry out with that poet we once thought might 
become a prophet : — 

. . . "on, but on does the old earth steer 
As if her port she knew. 
God, dear God! Does she know her port, 
Though she goes so far about? 
- Or blind astray, does she make her sport 
To brazen and chance it out? 
I watched when her captains passed: 
She were better captainless. 
Men in the cabins, before the mast, 
But some were reckless and some aghast, 
And some sat gorged at mess." 



156 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

Sometime or other the most hopeful of us suffer 
moments of pessimism, and some few, the specific 
gravity of whose souls has been determined by the 
exclusion of all the brighter and more hopeful ele- 
ments furnished by Christian faith, sink to its 
depths. Suicide itself seems a way to good. "The 
door stands open!'' "Death," says Hauptmann, 
in the person of Michael Kramer, " is the mildest 
form of life. The activities of the great world are 
the shudder ings of fever." And who can ever 
forget the gathering despair of Rosmersholm with 
the mad rush of the unhappy man and woman to 
seek death in the mill stream? 

2. Nor is the case bettered when the man who 
has abandoned faith in God passes from pessimism 
to an alleged superiority to morality. Von Hart- 
mann declares that he freed himself from his Welt- 
schmerz — that luxurious sort of pessimism of which 
Germans alone seem capable — by writing about 
it. Thereafter he enjoyed the undisturbed serenity 
of the philosopher who lives in the world of thought, 
absorbed in observation even of his own pain, and 
expecting that men would escape from the illusion 
of hope only in a far distant future. Nietzsche, too, 
though fundamentally a preacher of what he re- 
gards as a better day to dawn when conventional 



THE LOVE OF THE GOD OF LAW 157 

Christian ethics are replaced by a life wholly sub- 
ordinate to the Will to Power, refused to admit the 
truth of either optimism or pessimism. To espouse 
either he declares would be to make oneself a de- 
fender or a critic of the God of the theologians — 
for which class of thinkers, it hardly needs to be 
added, Nietzsche has little use. 

But how far is such indifference preferable to 
that despair that can see pain rather than happiness 
as the outcome of the world-process? Under the 
atrophying influence of both, many a modern man 
has lost hope in himself, in his universe, and in his 
God. An attitude of soul which deadens all idealism 
is the chief ally of popular materialism. Pessimism 
has ceased to be an academic speculation and has 
spread into life. And there the gospel must meet it, 
conquer it, and replace it by trust in the Father of 
Jesus. God the Creator can be vindicated when He 
is seen to be God the Saviour. 

IV 

It is here we need that aspect of the work of a 
redeeming God the church has embodied in its 
doctrine of the atonement. The bearing of Jesus' 
death upon our assurance of the forgiveness of sin 
we shall notice later, but that death has here an 



158 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

equal meaning. It has come down to us across the 
centuries, not mere dogma, but a formula of courage 
and of optimism. The victory of this gentle life 
over the forces of evil and of animal decay was 
not accomplished from without, but from within. 
His was the triumph of the spiritual life. Jesus 
conquered the doubt and distrust and sorrow upon 
which the pessimist seizes. And if ever a man had 
justification for pessimism it was he. 

It is a bitter thing to be defeated in the conflict 
for personal advantage. Among the most pitiful 
sights of life is the man who once succeeded, but 
who now has failed. To meet such a one whom 
you have known in former years in all the strength 
of authority born of position and of wealth, and find 
him now submerged in the consciousness of defeat, 
is to enter into one of the tragedies of this strange 
maelstrom we call civilization. But there is a de- 
feat more bitter than that of the man who has suf- 
fered defeat in his struggle for wealth, or fame, or 
control over human lives. It is the defeat that over- 
takes a man because he has put self aside and has 
striven to help others; who has dared believe hu- 
manity something better than it turned out to be; 
and has striven to make men realize their own 
spiritual possibilities. For such a life to find itself 



THE LOVE OF THE GOD OF LAW 1 59 

rejected, misinterpreted, abused, betrayed, con- 
demned as criminal, is to strain faith to the utmost. 
And Jesus bore all this and more. For in one black 
moment on the cross he shared also in that despair 
which those feel who, seeing hope and friends for- 
sake them, think God Himself unfaithful. 

The gospel in teaching that God is love not only 
faces this tragic aspect of life, but it makes it the 
basis of the boldest hope the human mind has ever 
reached. There have been men who have thought 
the God of Law is the God of Love because they 
were fortunate. But the gospel dares believe God 
is love because Jesus was defeated. To it the 
miseries of the Christian life are but the darker side 
of the true life process. It insists that it is wiser to 
act on the conviction that love is the divine life 
and bear the consequent buffetings of outrageous 
fortune, than to sacrifice that faith to immediate 
success. The faith of Jesus grows contagious. We 
also dare make the adventure of such trust in God. 

But Jesus is here not merely example and influ- 
ence. He is revelation. The dead Christ was the 
risen Christ, set forth by God to faith, in his very 
blood, as evidence that the God who forgives the 
sinner is the same God who punishes sin. To the 
man who believes in Jesus, the God of Law is more 



l6o THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

readily seen to be the God of Love. The dead Christ 
lives. That is the seal of the evangelic conviction 
that the God of Law is the God of Love; for in his 
triumph are revealed the possibilities of humanity^s 
triumph as well. That is the truth which the Greek 
fathers saw so clearly. The self which, simply be- 
cause it is human, must inherit the miseries born of 
chemical, physical, and social forces, can also, if 
only like Jesus it be spiritually at one with the 
God of things as they are to be, rise with Jesus 
to the trust and courage and freedom which are the 
inheritance of the sons of God. Who can separate 
His sons from the love of God ? They have, with 
Jesus, found their true life where Nature, red of 
tooth and claw, can never reach them. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 

Sin proposes a metaphysical problem of no small 
difficulty. Approach it as one may it refuses to di- 
vulge its real nature or quite to explain its existence 
in a God-ruled universe. None the less, sin, like 
its fellow-mystery, life, is no stranger to the modern 
man. A sense of its terrible power is another 
prompting to that cry for help which is the heart of 
all healthy religion. To minimize sin is to give the 
lie to the most ordinary experience of life. We do 
not need to define it in order to recognize it; we 
do not need to know its origin in order to pray for 
deliverance from its power. 

I 

I. Sin to Jesus was a terrible reality, not a mere 
negation. He had no quarrel with ceremonials. 
He came not to destroy the law, and with true con- 
structive spirit he cautioned his followers from a 
revolutionary break with their national religion. 
But he was a deadly enemy of that tendency only 

M l6l 



1 62 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

too common among Pharisaical teachers of all ages 
to narrow sin to illegality. From the point of view 
of the Pharisees Jesus was hopeless. He shattered 
by word and precept all that carefully developed 
exposition of statutory righteousness which was the 
glory of the schools. His violation of the Sabbath 
regulations of the rabbis was constant and open. 
He scorned that minute conscientiousness which 
could tithe mint and annis and cummin and make 
ceremonial hand-washing before meals a matter of 
supreme religious importance. He rejected fasting 
as an offset for wrongdoing. Instead of the exces- 
sive religiosity and minute punctiliousness of formal 
ethics he emphasized those states and acts which the 
morality of Pharisaism did not deny but neglected. 
He laid down as a fundamental principle that it is 
the life which acts and the life which is bad or good. 
Text-books of morality have time and again listed 
deeds which are wrong in themselves. Jesus goes 
deeper. With him righteousness is not statutory 
but hygienic. A man may become so thoroughly 
degenerate as to be morally hopeless; he may get 
into the grip of an eternal sin and reach the place 
where he mistakes God's acts for those of Satan, 
goodness for badness. For a personality so de- 
generate forgiveness is impossible. 



THE FORGIVE^JESS OF SIN 1 63 

Any attempt at definition which seeks to present 
Jesus' thought of sin falls short of what we instinc- 
tively feel is his real estimate. One might as well try to 
define life and death. If we say that his idea of sin is 
that of conduct not controlled by love, we are not far 
from the truth, for sin with Jesus is essentially anti- 
social ; but such a formula seems too atomistic and 
ineffective compared with his own vital analysis. We 
might say that he teacher that sin is a quality of the 
soul which leads to acts which benefit oneself at the 
cost of somebody else; that also is true, but it stirs 
a response which is hardly more self-condemnatory 
than that roused by the words of Epictetus. We 
might say that sin with Jesus is that state of the soul 
which expresses itself in acts which are injurious to 
personality, his or another's, and indicate that a man 
is unlike and hostile to a fatherly God. And here in 
the religious field we come closest to Jesus' thought. 
Out from such a soul there stream individual and 
social ill — impurity and selfishness, anger and re- 
venge, insincerity and pride. These are no abstract 
qualities. Each one of them is the expression of per- 
verted life. Any one of them sets a man against not 
only his fellows but against his God. They all deny 
that the Spiritual Life whose center is Love is the 
supreme force in the universe. Therefore it was not 



164 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

merely because a man caused suffering to others that 
Jesus so passionately warned men against that which 
the moral sentiment abhors. With him sin not only 
resulted in injury to others; by its very nature it 
put the man himself out of sympathy with, nay in 
opposition to, God. And this opposition, like all 
anarchy and rebellion, he knew must bring suffering. 
2. Paul expresses this thought more elaborately. 
He sees in a man two warring forces, the spirit and the 
flesh — the inner man and the outer man. By this 
he does not mean to oppose a man's body to his soul, 
for Paul never would have insisted that the bodily 
impulses were wrong in themselves. He did not 
agree with those philosophers of his day who believed 
that matter was inherently bad. What he really 
means by flesh is those impulses which we share with 
the beasts. In themselves they are neither good nor 
bad. They constantly prompt to action, but it is 
only as they are made supreme or as they are mis- 
used that they become sinful. All of them the 
Christian ought to make thoroughly secondary and 
to use legitimately. Sensuality, the desire to suc- 
ceed at the cost of other people, quarrelsomeness, 
perverted religious instincts — all these are bad, 
because they are the persuasions of animal im- 
pulses and are contrary to and tend to enslave a 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 1 65 

man's spiritual nature and make him less like 
God. That, according to Paul, is exactly the situ- 
ation of the unforgiven man. He has yielded to 
the backward pull. The spirit which is in the 
image of God, in that it can love and sacrifice 
and hope and believe and serve, has prostituted 
itself to the lower self, which hates and lusts and 
lies and fights like the beasts. Personality itself is 
injured. And such subjection, unless it be broken, 
culminates in the experience of what was to Paul 
the summary of terror, ''the wrath of God." 

3. The modern man with a belief in evolution 
that is something more than purposeless genetic 
change cannot do better than to close with this con- 
ception of sin. For sin, in that it leads to unlikeness 
with the God of Love, emerges clearly enough in the 
struggle of a lower self to get control of the spiritual 
personality which would be loving like God. It is the 
backward pull that makes Godlikeness so difficult. 
The watchword of the lower self is life at the expense 
of others ; the watchword of the higher self is life in 
service for others. The struggle between those two 
lives is the meaning of the contrast between the two 
Ages, and is concretely expressed in that experience of 
Jesus known as the Temptation. Cast in the form 
of dramatic dialogue it is really an exposition of 



1 66 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

that typical moral struggle which, present in every 
man, reached its highest expression in Jesus. He 
alone among all men perfectly represented the Spirit- 
ual Life, but like every other man he felt the struggle 
of that lower self which comes over from the centuries 
of development, and would check the growth of that 
higher self which is farthest from the animal and 
nearest to God. There was no harm in being hun- 
gry, but when hunger would direct messianic power 
it was temptation. There was no sin in seeking to 
win a world ; it became temptation to sin only when 
selfish ambition made messianic power its subject. 
There was no sin in that faith which could trust God 
to bear one up if one leaped from the roof of the 
portico; it was temptation to sin only when an 
irrational faith would tempt divine love. 

Temptation comes, as we have said, when an im- 
perfect good of the past surviving in oneself would 
set up ideals for a growing spiritual life. In their 
origin such survivals may be neither good nor evil. 
In a true sense they lie outside the moral sphere. 
Sin appears only when personality is violated or pros- 
tituted to the service of that which is less personal or 
impersonal. Only as they serve to subject better, 
that is, the more Godlike elements of man's being, are 
physical impulses an occasion of sin. By making 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 1 67 

such survivals paramount man transforms this non- 
moral tendency into sin just as he makes originally 
harmless germs pathogenic. He perverts person- 
ality itself by destroying the perspective of its 
values. 

Those impulses, complete obedience to which is 
sinfulness, and a voluntary action in accordance with 
which as supreme is a sin, will be found to be ex- 
pressions of the two great elements of life — the im- 
pulse to perpetuate itself in descendants and the 
impulse to preserve itself from destruction. True, in 
such elemental impulses lies in no small way the ex- 
planation of the progress through which life on this 
globe has passed. As we look back over the past we 
cannot regret the existence of the impulses to propa- 
gate and to preserve life. Without the first, living 
beings would have long since perished from the earth. 
Without the second, some weak organism or some 
social institution ill adapted to progress might have 
determined the course of evolution. But out from 
the first impulse, if only it be made supreme in a man, 
springs sensuality with its attendant vices; and out 
from the second, if it be treated as supreme, springs 
human selfishness and that mad competition which 
results not in the survival of the spiritually fittest, 
but in the pitiless victory of the strongest. To make 



1 68 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

either of these two exclusively vital impulses domi- 
nant in conduct is to reduce life to the standard 
of the animal. To make any of their more primitive 
social expressions dominant is to revert to savagery. 
A sin as distinct from sin may be described as volun- 
tary action opposed to the divine purpose as seen in 
the steady progress of life up from the vegetable into 
the animal and so out into the social and ever more 
personal realm. Its content is selfishness. To com- 
mit it is to set oneself against a cosmic God. The 
grosser sins are, of course, evidently cases of voluntary 
reversions to lower types. A man who is a hypocrite 
is voluntarily following the instinct to deceive others 
in the interest of benefiting himself, and is exalting 
an impulse which, however necessary for the animal, 
is utterly out of place in a man who must live with his 
fellows. Nor are other illustrations hard to find. 
Is not the thief reproducing in himself qualities of the 
animal who prowls by night ? Is not the man who 
sinks his individual responsibility for wrongdoing in 
corporations like a wolf that runs with the pack? 
Did not Paul rightly characterize the desire of the 
Corinthian Christians to quarrel and form rival theo- 
logical parties as '* carnal"? 

The more refined sin becomes the greater may be its 
danger. The world abounds in thieves, liars, and 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 1 69 

adulterers, but it is not clear that they are the worst 
sort of sinners. As civilization develops sin grows 
corporate. We sin socially by violating social rather 
than individualistic personal relations. Individually 
a sinner may be kindly and pure and honest. There 
is many a theater manager growing rich by pander- 
ing to sexual excitement who is a faithful husband. 
There is many a gambler who is never charged with 
cheating. There^are many directors and stockholders 
of corporations who are exemplary in their indi- 
vidual relations, but who in their corporate capacity 
do not hesitate to connive at efforts to bribe legisla- 
tures, adulterate foods, unscrupulously crush out 
competitors, destroy family life by subsidizing 
saloons, corrupt public opinion by distorting news, 
induce unsuspecting investors to buy worthless 
stock, crush out the lives of children in factories, 
and underpay women employees in their stores. 
Such men — and some women — are tempted to 
protect themselves by retreating behind the theory 
that such matters belong to the realm of business 
rather than to that of ethics. But they cannot 
thereby escape. The God who is working in human 
society will not be deceived by charters, or bought 
off by dividends. 
4. Here we face three alarming facts: Whatever 



170 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

theory as to the origin of sin we may accept, the great 
fact cannot be overlooked that, just because as human 
beings we are a mass of recapitulated impulses and 
social habits, we advance with effort, we degenerate 
with ease. Here we face not a mere aggregation of 
sinful acts, but a common tendency innate in our 
very humanity, the "original" sin of the Latin 
fathers. As far back as we can trace it — and Paul 
acutely traced it to Adam — we find this ease of re- 
version generically in the race. Nay, it increases 
as habits grow socialized. We may call it bias, 
we may split metaphysical hairs as to our responsibil- 
ity for it, but the fact remains. We may endeavor to 
gloss it over by some contradictions between deter- 
minism and free-will ; we may cry out against it most 
bitterly; but the fact of inherited tendencies that 
make easy the reversion to a lower type both in indi- 
vidual and society refutes all our denials. Sin is thus 
more than individual wrongdoing. It involves that 
progress in the social person of which we now make 
so much. Once slavery was progress. Now it is 
sinful. Once concubinage was legal. Now, in 
Christian states, it is illegal. To revert to either — or 
many another practice justified by a distant or even a 
recent past — would be a sin. Yet who but realizes 
that such an act would be easier than to live absolutely 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 171 

according to modem law — to say nothing about 
conforming to the supreme ideals of Jesus ? 

A second fact is here evident. Society itself has to 
no small extent become a minister of sin. Personal 
wrongdoing lives on in its social results, institutional 
or otherwise. Lives subject to the reversionary 
influence find themselves from childhood in touch 
with a social mind that suggests imitation of its evil 
as well as of its better elements. With our knowledge 
of the self and of society we see that Augustine and 
Pelagius were both right. The backward pull is in 
our nature, and social relations incite us to an imitation 
of its expression in society. Individual and society 
alike must be regenerate if sin is to be removed from 
ourselves and our world. 

The third fact is even more serious. Despite all 
warnings as to results, the supremacy of the lower self 
brings a certain sort of pleasure. That is one reason 
why sin is so attractive. A man does not steal be- 
cause he feels that it is wicked to steal, but because 
he gets hold of property. A man does not lie be- 
cause he thinks it is wicked to lie, but because by 
lying he in some way gets an advantage over some 
one else. A man does not get drunk because he 
knows it is wrong to drink, but because of the satis- 
faction he has in an orgy. Men do not organize the 



172 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

white slave traffic in order to bring misery upon inno- 
cent, credulous girls, but because there is a livelihood 
in supplying vicious wants. Men and corporations 
do not break laws because they like lawlessness, but 
because there are material advantages in lawlessness. 
Sin is so deeply intrenched in our social life as to be all 
but ineradicable. And yet we can be saved from it. 

II 

I. The first step in the gospel's method of saving 
men from sin is to arouse them to the danger of yield- 
ing to this powerful tendency. Our modern life 
needs a call to moral discontent. We are suffering 
from indifference to everything except creature com- 
forts. We are too complacent, too ready to think 
that we are good because we are prosperous. We 
may not be as conceited as the Pharisee, but most of 
us cannot understand the humility of the publican. 
Much of the appeal made to-day in the more pro- 
gressive pulpits overlooks the fact that multitudes of 
people are bad. God is a Father, we are told, and 
men should come to him because he is loving. That 
is true ; but no religion has ever long gripped human- 
ity that has deceived itself into believing that men are 
better than they are. Even the Christian Scientist 
has his "mortal mind." It is no safer to trifle with 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 1 73 

disease of the soul than with disease of the body, but 
it is hard to make men believe that they really need a 
spiritual physician. They would rather be amused. 

The great difficulty confronting the attempt to re- 
duce Christianity to a mere philosophy of values lies 
in the fact that every such attempt is liable to pre- 
suppose an awakened Christian experience. In the 
long run the test of any religion will be its capacity 
to arouse repentance and religious consecration. 
It is one thing for a theology to nurture a life already 
Christian ; it it is quite another to beget that Chris- 
tian life. A church must be something more than a 
theological orphanage. It must have its own spirit- 
ual children. It is a sense of the reality of sin that 
alone can make of the gospel anything more than 
a graduate lecture course in Christian ethics. A 
religious message that cannot stir sinners to repent- 
ance is not the gospel of the New Testament. 

That is not to say that a man must wait until he is 
very wicked before he comes to God. It is not to say 
that the pulpit should imitate Jonathan Edwards 
and preach on *' Sinners in the Hands of an Angry 
God." It is not to say that children who have grown 
up under the beneficent influence of Christian fami- 
lies should be forced to confess a guilt of which they 
are not conscious. It is still farther from saying that 



174 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

we should not so educate our children that as they 
grow in stature they shall also grow in moral sensitive- 
ness and in favor with God. But it is to say that we 
can no more overlook the fact of sin than we can 
overlook the fact of tuberculosis. Whether those 
whom we would bring to God are children or adults 
the gospel should come as a message of salvation. 
But you cannot get people, young or old, to want 
to be saved unless they are convinced that there is 
something to be saved from. 

Now it is no more pleasurable to-day to convince 
persons of the truth of a moral diagnosis than it was to 
convince their fathers. Prophets have always found 
that their physical comfort decreased in proportion 
as they increased their hearers' moral discomfort. In 
many cases wrongdoing seems to guarantee prosperity. 
The Psalmist had his faith shaken by this fact long 
ago. He saw the wicked prosperous and possessing 
the good things of life, while the righteous seemed 
to be exceedingly unfortunate. He found his faith, 
as he said, ready to stagger. His disquietude has 
persisted. Why do good men fail in business while 
unscrupulous promoters grow rich? Why do bad 
men so enjoy themselves? 

Yet, just because of these stumblingblocks, men 
must be made to see the danger of this reversal 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 1 75 

of values. The mere fact of pleasure in sin must be 
shown to be an evidence of moral disease just as 
excessive appetite is an evidence of dyspepsia. 
Men and children alike must be made to feel that to 
yield to unworthy impulses, despite the ease and the 
pleasure of such yielding, is dangerous and a guaran- 
tee of suffering as truly as disease is a guarantee of 
suffering. 

2. Sin, as Jesus and Paul and the prophets taught, 
is evidently something more than wrongdoing. It is 
a violation of the will of God. It is an attack upon 
the God of the universe. That can mean no other 
outcome than suffering. Sin comes in when men 
refuse to go on with a self-revealing God and seek to 
make any stage of that process-revelation final. 
They oppose the God who wills that the universe 
and humanity shall become, not merely be. 

Some sins do not involve an appreciable injury 
to others. The spirit of rebellion against God, the 
hatred of goodness, blasphemy and pride, may not 
directly result in wrongdoing to our fellow men, but 
they are sins nevertheless, for they are a revolt 
against God's will as seen both in Jesus and in the 
nature of things. There could be wrongdoing if there 
were no God in the universe, and it would cause 
suffering; but it is hard to see how we could then 



176 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

believe that suffering would necessarily extend to the 
wrongdoer himself. But for the man who believes 
in God there is no such uncertainty. A man may 
evade the laws made by legislatures, but he can no 
more evade the will of God in the realm of morals 
than he can deceive the law of gravitation. The 
same immanent Spirit that makes it certain that a 
man who jumps off a cliff will be dashed to pieces 
makes it just as certain that the soul that sins shall 
suffer. We may wish that God was more good- 
natured ; we may even sometimes succeed in persuad- 
ing ourselves that He is; but such flaccid optimism 
no more affects the nature of things than it affects 
the laws of climate or of chemical combinations. A 
terrible God is this God of Love, immanent in social 
process. 

3. But how are men to be convinced that such 
future suffering is sure ? Is not God good ? Will the 
Father punish His children for their mistakes and 
their yielding to temptation ? 

There are two replies that can be made to this 
question. In the first place we know something of 
how a loving God works. The man who cuts off his 
arm never sees it grow again. The child who plays 
with fire is burned. Shall God be any less a God of 
Law in the moral world ? The God who has so made 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 177 

humanity that the drunkard has delirium tremens 
is the same God who speaks through the lawgiver and 
the prophet and Christ, warning men of the outcome 
of sin in their spiritual selves. One can even see 
His punitive will in the inevitableness of suffering 
from sin in ordinary experience. Dishonesty for a 
time seems to be advantageous, but sooner or later 
the God of Law makes the wrath of men to praise 
him, and the thief, be he ever so respectable in his 
thieving, pays the penalty of his crime. The past few 
years, with their record of bankruptcy and suicide, 
have shown that God is still in history and that men 
cannot trifle with the eternal laws of righteousness. 

So long as the God of process has not abdicated, we 
must believe, also, that death transforms sin into suf- 
fering. The terrible pictures of the Judgment Day 
and hell have reality back of them. The loss of the 
body in itself is as truly punishment for those who 
have "lived to the flesh" as would be the loss of a 
hand to a pianist. All that we know of human na- 
ture argues that death makes a man neither better 
nor worse; it simply introduces a new mode of exist- 
ence. And that new existence will be full of joy 
or misery according to the readiness of the soul to 
live in it. A man thrown into mid-ocean drowns. 
A bad man in the spiritual world will be in misery. 

N 



178 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

It cannot be otherwise. God is not mocked. What 
a man sows he reaps. 

In the second place the gospel would insist that 
there is only one unforgivable sin; the living as if 
love were not supreme. Such a living, as Jesus 
warned the Pharisees, makes men see God only as 
Satan ; refuses to forgive enemies ; fights and maligns 
the representatives of love. That is the blasphemy 
against the Holy Ghost. 

To describe God as love is to herald the inevitable 
defeat of every man who is not loving. For it is 
God who is love. And can a man win against God ? 
Obscurant definitions here will not avail. If the 
process in which we are involved is dominated by 
love, then he who is not loving must bear the 
brunt of the process itself. 

It is sometimes said that modern thought is re- 
moving the punitive God from His universe. It 
seems to me, on the contrary, that it is bringing that 
God into the universe and even more into human life. 
The God that the scientific investigator compels us 
to accept is more a God to be feared than even the 
Jehovah of the prophets. To be sure, for the eye of 
faith there is love in the universe, but it is no wonder 
that men who look simply at the darker side of the 
reign of law grow pessimistic. It is a fearful thing for 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 1 79 

an unloving man to fall into the hands of a loving God. 
That sounds like a paradox, but it is more: it is a 
reading of the universe. 

4. The man who is not susceptible to fear can re- 
spond to the gospel's appeal to his shame. Whose 
conscience does not condemn him as he faces the 
Master ? However unsatisfactory may be some forms 
at least of the so-called moral influence of the atone- 
ment, no man can deny the appeal which the suffering 
Christ makes to the morally sensitive soul. Recall 
Bernard and Francis. The picture of a Christ who, 
although he had done no evil, found himself the vic- 
tim of sin is a perennial challenge to the man who 
would belittle the significance of sin. For he can 
see that the motives which led the authorities of 
Judea to take so pure and noble a life as Jesus' were 
not peculiar to Judea. They are as old and as new 
as humanity itself. Bad men hate loving men. 

Nor are these the only appeals of Jesus. He stirs 
humanity. Children as well as men find their moral 
sense quickened in the presence of a hero and a mar- 
tyr. And such a response of the spiritual self is the 
source of moral convalescence in the same proportion 
as it springs from even an unformulated recognition 
of the worth of the principles for which the hero or 
martyr stood. Perhaps the most quickening appeal 



l8o THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

that the gospel can make to the modem man — and 
to the modern adolescent — with his conventional 
morality, is the Christ who bore testimony to the 
dangers of sin by preferring the dangers of righteous- 
ness. Even if he were an unhistorical picture he 
would still have its power to stir the depths of the 
moral life. How much mightier will he be as he is 
seen to be more than allegory or symbol ! 

Ill 

I. This deliverance from sin and its consequences 
promised by the gospel does not presuppose that a 
man shall be immediately morally perfect. Deliver- 
ance consists in evoking a Godlike spiritual life in a 
sinful man. That is the difficult paradox for every 
man who has rightly read his own nature, and which 
to the Jewish Christian seemed dangerously near the 
violation of the fundamental law of God Himself. 
The faith of the early Jewish Christians who made 
such trouble for Paul among the early churches of 
Galatia is entirely intelligible. They believed that 
Jesus was the Christ and that such faith would carry 
them into the messianic kingdom which he was to es- 
tablish, saved from death and from the condemnation 
of the Judgment Day. But they believed that such 
blessing was possible only for those who w-ere Jews, 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN l8l 

and therefore they endeavored both scrupulously 
and unscrupulously to induce Gentile Christians to 
perform the works of the law. True, after the 
Apostolic conference at Jerusalem they were ready to 
reduce the demands for ritual observance to a mini- 
mum, but there still lay in the heart of the Judaistic 
Christian the belief that if one were to gain the 
blessing promised to Abraham he must be a member 
of the Jewish community. 

Over against this was the insistence of Paul upon 
justification, or, as it might be more accurately called, 
acquittal through faith. Paul's acute mind rejected 
any conception of deliverance from sin that involved 
the counting of atomistic deeds and the striking of a 
balance. Human nature itself was infected. Faith 
in Jesus involved a voluntary attitude toward God the 
reverse of that which is exhibited in following the 
tendency away from God. Paul saw only too well 
that the tendency to make "flesh" supreme which 
lay in man's nature in itself exposed a man to the 
penalty of a broken law. It could make no difference 
whether his violations were many or few. The man 
who violated the law at a single point had actually 
broken the law and was liable to punishment. He 
was not responsible for the tendency, but unaided by 
God he would yield to its power. However theoreti- 



1 82 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

cally he might be able to keep the law of God and his 
own conscience, practically he was guilty. God must 
pardon if he were to be saved from punishment. 

2. So simple and consistent a scheme is entirely 
intelligible to the modem man, but he cannot help 
querying what there is in it for his own moral and reli- 
gious life. His fundamental conception of the universe 
makes it difficult for him to respond to the forensic 
conception of God as a monarch who establishes days 
of trial and passes individual sentences upon millions 
of lives. His idea of law makes it hard for him to 
think of a remitted penalty in a moral world, where 
relations are genetic and only figuratively to be con- 
ceived of in terms of the law court and a king. Moral 
questions, like all other problems of the universe, can 
be thought of literally by the modem man only 
in the terms of law, of organism, and environment. 

Has, then, this aspect of the gospel no meaning for 
him ? And is it, precisely understood, no part of the 
modern preacher's message? We cannot so believe. 
An evil act certainly implies an evil nature, and the 
results described as Judgment Day and penalty are 
among the fundamental facts of the modem man. As 
his equivalent of the judgment he has the postponed 
effects of the working of the causes in the moral world ; 
and of the penalty, the suffering of the degenerate. 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 183 

Nor is this all. The modern man can accept sin- 
cerely the great truth taught by Jesus and his disciples 
that God must be the Saviour if the man is to be saved. 
In the face of to-day^s psychology and sociology who 
would dare say the unaided individual is ever able 
to prevent the outworkings of the forces of evil? 
Every life has its unearned increment of character 
bom of its social situation. It would have been 
better or worse had it not been swept on by its en- 
vironments. The very insistence of the New Testa- 
ment upon the divine element in salvation makes it 
the easier for the modem man to welcome and to 
understand. The past is irrevocable except as its 
consequences are overcome by the very powers that 
are making a different future. 

But if this irrevocableness is due to the working of 
the immanent God, then God must save us. And 
He must save us by enabling us to counterbalance the 
awful tendency to sinful living that brings suffer- 
ing. The spiritual life must be made triumphant by 
the Spirit of God. 

Have we confidence to believe that each of us can 
share in regenerating love ? Love we believe is at the 
heart of things, but the love revealed by philosophy 
and science is a heartless, relentless process-love that 
saves the race by crushing the individual who refuses 



184 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

to conform to its ongoing. Most men want to be 
saved themselves. Who can give us the assurance 
that divine love can save the individual man or 
woman, and who can show us the sort of life implied 
by such a salvation? 

The reply comes from the gospel: Jesus. In 
him is to be seen the redemptive life of God. In 
him was the spiritual life that triumphs over tempta- 
tion and the natural order. Knowing him and his 
teaching we know how to harmonize our life with the 
regenerating life of God. We simply have to live 
like our Master. So to live is to come under the 
saving power of God. It is to establish a personal sit- 
uation which in itself is dynamic, and the result of 
which, so far as the individual is concerned, must 
mean progress toward likeness with the God who is 
one element of the situation. For in friendship per- 
sonality always transforms personality. The fact 
that such a divinely regenerate life will be ultimately 
victorious over passion and sin and death, is to-day's 
equivalent of that removal of guilt which Paul de- 
scribed as justification. The loving God of the uni- 
verse will save a man who tries to live like Jesus. 
Of this we are sure. For such a man will have the 
spiritual life, the ''mind" of Jesus. 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 185 

IV 

But the experience of forgiveness and his certainty 
of acquittal at the coming Judgment Day left in 
Paul's mind the question: Is it just that one who is 
morally imperfect should escape the consequences 
of his sin? In such a case is not the moral order 
threatened ? 

This question, springing as it does from the keen 
realization of guilt which so marked the Hebrew 
religion, was never raised by Jesus. He simply 
argued that God's fatherliness could be trusted 
to welcome the prodigal just as implicitly as a human 
father could be trusted to give good gifts to his chil- 
dren. But such an answer did not and will not satisfy 
minds that seek to systematize such forgiveness with 
their world-view. The question of Paul was inevi- 
table. 

It is to be noticed, however, that Christian ex- 
perience is here the point of departure. Paul did 
not believe in the forgiveness of sin because he 
believed in an atonement; he believed in an atone- 
ment because he had experienced that which im- 
plies that his sin was forgiven. Because of the gift 
of the Spirit he never doubted that God and he 
were actually reconciled and that punishment was 
no longer to be feared by him. The further ques- 



1 86 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

tion concerned not himself but the moral sover- 
eignty of God. He found his answer suggested in 
the very presuppositions of the world-view which 
suggested the question as to the moral order. The 
sovereign God wanted to forgive and had forgiven 
those who had accepted Jesus as Christ. He had, 
however, preserved the integrity of His law and of 
His sovereignty in this act of grace, by setting forth 
Jesus himself in his blood as the propitiatory gift 
which sealed reconciliation. From a little different 
angle Jesus was also conceived of by Paul as a king 
who died vicariously for his followers — an analogy 
doubtless suggested by the not infrequent punish- 
ment of a rebellious king by the Romans as an off- 
set for the exhibition of certain clemency to his 
rebellious subjects. Jesus had borne death, the 
punishment of sin, although he himself had not 
sinned. God's sovereignty was therefore vindi- 
cated and He was free to acquit those whom He 
would. 

The New Testament writers no more than Paul 
ever elaborated systematically this atoning work of 
Christ. They make it real to the believer by the 
use of figures. But all of them — sacrifice, redemp- 
tion, purchase — clearly enough possess the same 
significance; the death of the Christ was a neces- 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 1 87 

sary, an integral part of his very vocation as deliverer. 
He died in behalf of sinners. Not, it is true, in the 
sense that God had to be placated or appeased. 
Without exception, the apostles held that God 
Himself originated the plan of salvation. The sac- 
rificial aspect of the death of the Christ was derived 
from a belief as to what the death of the lamb did 
for the man who sought reconciliation with God 
at the altar. It brought the final assurance of 
such reconciliation and removal of guilt. Christ 
was the Christian's passover, and his death was 
interpreted figuratively as the seal of the believers' 
assurance of reconciliation. Viewed as a ransom 
or purchase, the death of Christ was never in the 
New Testament treated as an actual payment to 
Satan or to God, but rather as the cost of his mes- 
sianic work. He could not save without dying; 
for death was the penalty of sin from which men 
were to be saved, and the revelation of the possi- 
bility of such deliverance could be made only by 
an actual and typical example of such deliverance. 
In a truer sense than men have sometimes seen, 
the Christ bore the sin of the world; for as part 
of a world in which sin was socialized he bore to 
the full its outcome of hate and violence and 
death. 



l88 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

V 

I. It was inevitable that this dogmatically un- 
developed estimate of the death of Christ should 
have ceased to satisfy the minds of those who en- 
deavored to set forth their Christianity as a philo- 
sophical system. Yet, somewhat strangely, the 
doctrine of the atonement was among the last of 
the doctrines to be systematically developed. Chris- 
tianity conquered the Roman world without pos- 
sessing any authoritative doctrine of the atonement. 
Indeed, the Greek, as contrasted with the Latin 
Fathers, with the Roman sense of law and its 
punishment, always found in the death of Jesus an 
element in their characteristic doctrine of salvation, 
viz. that in Jesus humanity was brought to im- 
mortality rather than to forensic guiltlessness. For 
hundreds of years the figures of the ransom were 
conceived of literally and Jesus was believed to 
have given himself a ransom to Satan in return for 
the release of the saints in Sheol. Such a concep- 
tion rests upon the assumption that Satan had a 
claim on man which God Himself had to recognize ; 
and this is definitely stated by some of the greatest 
of the church fathers. Indeed, so far was this con- 
ception pushed that deliverance was believed to have 
been accomplished by deceit, according to such 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 189 

fathers as Gregory of Nyssa, Ambrose, Leo, and 
Gregory I. According to the latter the humanity 
of Jesus was a bait offered by God to the devil, 
who snapped at it and was left hanging on the in- 
visible hook, Christ's divinity. Such a plan of 
salvation was frankly called by one of its champions, 
the great Ambrose, a ** pious fraud." 

Such a grotesque theory of the atonement, al- 
though natural for the man who interprets certain 
figures of the New Testament literally, was ob- 
viously to be held only at the expense of a belief 
in a moral God. Yet it was difficult to eradicate 
it from the thought of men. Even to the present 
day it will occasionally be met. But from the time 
of Origen it was supplemented by the conception 
of sacrifice, the outgrowth of social experience. 
Christ's flesh, according to many of the early writers, 
was an actual sacrifice offered to God. As early 
as the fourth century we find the idea that such a 
sacrificial death of God was the only means by 
which the death decreed by Him could be van- 
quished and thus harmony be brought between Him 
and His love. 

This conception of the death of Christ as sacrifice, 
though undeveloped as long as sacrifice was an 
existing social institution, was given a new turn in 



IQO THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

the West by the growing secondary Christianity of 
the Latin church. The conception of merit through 
penance was extended to the work of Christ. From 
the days of TertulHan Latin Christianity increas- 
ingly beheved that God needed to be propitiated 
through suffering, and there grew up inevitably the 
quantitative conception of such suffering. If there 
was more suffering than there was guilt, or if a 
man did more than his prescribed duty, he would 
lay up merit. Thus there developed the theory 
that, as Jesus was sinless, his sufferings and death 
possessed merits which could be transferred through 
the church to the elect. This conception, which 
still survives in the Christian creeds, was supple- 
mented by Anselm with the German conception of 
composition (Wehrgeld) and the idea of honor per- 
meating the age of chivalry. An injury to another 
was of two parts; that to the person or estate, and 
that to the ''honor" or "dignity." It could be 
requited by the lex talionis, or the injured party's 
honor could be satisfied by the punishment or the 
submission of the wrongdoer, or by the payment 
of a sum of money. Every injury was thus easily 
translated into a debt varying with the "honor" of 
the person injured. In the case of God, humanity 
owed him absolute obedience, but since men had 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN I9I 

sinned they owed him reparation. As God is 
infinite the injury and consequently the debt to his 
honor were infinite. Obviously mankind being 
finite could not make the amende honorable to the 
injured deity and would have been hopelessly lost 
had not God become man and made infinite satis- 
faction in the person of the God-man Jesus. This 
belief, born of social practice, expressed by Anselm in 
his famous treatise " Cur Deus Homo^^ was the first 
attempt to utilize the death of Jesus in really sys- 
tematic fashion. The "satisfaction" of the in- 
finite debt owed by man to God whose infinite 
honor he had injured could be paid only by God 
who became man. The suffering of the human 
nature of Christ was magnified to infinity by his 
divine nature, and thus the way was open for God, 
with honor satisfied, to forgive those elect who had 
faith and works. 

2. It is unnecessary to trace further the theories 
of an objective atonement by the Christ. They are 
all modifications of ransom, sacrifice, or satisfac- 
tion. Not always as distinct as these original 
types, they have seldom advanced far beyond them. 
Whether God's justice or His law needed vindica- 
tion makes small difference. All theories as to the 
atonement implicitly or explicitly imply that the 



192 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

moral unity of God is threatened by His forgiveness 
of sins. He is in danger of losing either His repu- 
tation as the God of Law, or His right to forgive. 
And it is to avert this threatened schism in the 
divine character that the death of the Christ has 
been set forth in accordance with the prevailing 
concepts of various ages. 

It has followed that no theory has been uni- 
versally acceptable to the church. The social ideals 
on which each has been built have themselves been 
outgrown. Each has seemed to its critics to justify 
God at the expense of violating some fundamental 
ethical conviction of the Christian born of a higher 
social morality. And thus it has come to pass that 
throughout the history of the church there has been 
no view of the atonement so acceptable as that un- 
developed statement of the fact so variously ex- 
pressed in the New Testament, — that the death 
of Christ was an integral part and necessary out- 
come of his work of salvation. The varieties in the 
doctrines have never been unified by any ecumeni- 
cal council and there is thus no orthodox theory 
of the atonement on an equality with that of the 
person of Christ. Throughout Christendom each 
body of Christians, nay, I had almost said, each 
individual Christian, has his own view of this central 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN I93 

truth of the gospel. There are those who believe 
that Christ bore the quantitative equivalent of all 
the punishments due to all the sins of all mankind; 
others who hold that as the universal man he ac- 
tually bore the punishment due humanity; others 
who hold that God was graciously pleased to reckon 
the sufferings of Christ as rendering satisfaction for 
His law broken by mankind ; others who believe that 
by union with Christ the believer shares in his death 
and thus in the punishment borne by him; others, 
that as a substitute for the believer he bore suffer- 
ing which in their case would have been punish- 
ment; others, that by his death he expiated the 
sins of mankind and appeased an angry God ; others, 
that Christ offered in behalf of the race a universal 
and representative repentance which literally broke 
his heart so that he died of it. And the list might 
be extended indefinitely. 

Yet at one point the Christian consciousness of 
the ages has been at one. The death of Jesus was 
not that of a mere mart}^. In some way the West- 
ern world has found in it a release from its sense 
of guilt. The moral influence theory of the atone- 
ment represents a great truth, for his death was 
certainly calculated to move men to an appreciation 
of the love of God. But such a view is only par- 



194 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

tially satisfactory. Beyond the influence of the 
death upon mankind there is, as the apostles and 
the church have insisted, that which is a revelation 
of the divine economy which brings intellectual as 
well as religious peace. The modern man can 
think of this economy in terms of transfer of penalty 
only by abandoning his fundamental conception of 
the relation of God to His world, but he cannot 
overlook the inference that if Christ be all the 
Christian community feels he must have been, 
his death has a deeper significance than that of 
the moral influence of martyrdom. It is a reve- 
lation of God's purpose and character. Its worth 
is Christ's worth. 

VI 

But how shall the modern man express this con- 
viction in terms intelligible to himself? The trans- 
fer of penalty, sacrifice, and propitiation in the 
original sense of the terms, the satisfaction of the 
divine honor, the vindication of God's sovereign 
law — all these formulas, however helpful to their 
authors and in greater or less degrees to the church 
of to-day either spring from philosophies, rites, and 
political theories, which are meaningless to him, or 
fail to express his own sense of the nature of the 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN I95 

cosmic God. If he is to grasp the meaning of the 
forgiveness of sin in any sense like that of the gos- 
pel, he must place the death of Christ among those 
elements of his world-view that are the equivalent 
of those in which Paul expressed his own sense of 
its significance as a means of justifying his faith in 
God. It must be discovered by being correlated 
with the immanence of God, the divinely directed 
process of which human history is one phase, and 
social solidarity. 

True, he may say he has no need of such a for- 
mulation, that his faith in God requires no re- 
course to the death of Jesus for vindication. But 
none the less in the long run he will face the need, 
and then just as he has found courage and hope 
in the example of his Master will he find new help 
and faith in a proper estimate of his death. 

Nor is such an estimate impossible. Disregard- 
ing all questions as to what figures can best express 
our instinctive recognition of this deeper and, one 
is tempted to say, cosmic significance of Jesus' 
death, it is possible for a mind controlled by the 
presuppositions of the modern world to see in it 
certain literal truths of elemental importance. 

I. In the first place it exhibits Jesus' faith in the 
justice of God's moral order. 



196 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

(i) Jesus accepted as just the suffering involved 
in the social effects of sin. 

There is nothing in life more perplexing or mad- 
dening than to see a man reaping the results of 
other men^s wrongdoing, yet, by the laws of heredity 
and by the laws governing the socialization of in- 
fluence, nothing is more common. The sins of the 
fathers are visited unto the third and fourth genera- 
tions and the misery born of violation of the con- 
structive forces of society extend through war and 
poverty and a thousand other media to uncounted 
millions. To this great law Jesus became uncom- 
plainingly subject. He must have regarded it as 
at least just, as a part of the divine law. 

(2) By his death Jesus also recognized as just 
that other fact so desperately hard to understand, 
that service rendered by love to the higher needs 
of the world is at the expense of suffering caused by 
the sin of others. 

Vicarious suffering, through sympathy or body, 
seems to be demanded from love in every phase of 
human existence from birth to death. Just why 
this should be true in the case of sin we are unable 
to say. We only know that it is involved in that 
struggle by which the good man overcomes the 
force of his own and society's lower past. But just 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN I97 

because it does lie inextricably involved in the 
social solidarity of human life we want to realize 
its justice. Otherwise human history grows dia- 
bolical. If the effects of sin were to be limited to 
those who commit it, the problem would in a meas- 
ure disappear, for humanity as a whole recognizes 
the justice of punishment on the part of those who 
do wrong. But why should the innocent suffer? 
The question is a part of that larger question as to 
whether the God of Law is a God of Love, but with 
this difference : it involves our recoil from the inno- 
cent man's suffering the consequences of another's 
sin. Here again Jesus helps us with life rather 
than philosophy. If he had judged such a fact to 
be wrong we might have expected some protest from 
his lips, but he submitted to the fact as a part of 
the great world in which he was involved. Desiring 
to love and serve men he suffered that which such 
effort brought from the hatred of those whom he 
would help. And by his faith we are inspired to 
similar faith. 

2. In the second place the sufferings of Jesus 
exhibit his faith in the love of God. 

(i) The attitude of Jesus toward these two laws 
of social evolution was not that of desperate sub- 
mission. On the contrary, he accepted them as 



198 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

the will of a loving Father. He trusted the good- 
ness of the immanent God who had so organized 
humanity by His very presence that sin, by involv- 
ing the innocent as well as the guilty in its conse- 
quences, should be shown exceeding sinful. Such 
an attitude of mind is the complement of that love 
which would save humanity. But it is, if possible, 
something even more heroic and wonderful. It is 
one thing, like the condemned nobles of the Reign 
of Terror, to help a fellow creature doomed to one's 
own fate; it is quite another to believe that the 
judge who pronounces the common sentence is not 
only just but loving. The faith of Jesus was far 
enough from stoicism. In undergoing his suffering 
and death Jesus exhibited no mere speculative con- 
fidence in impersonal law. A submission to the 
physical world by no means excludes rebellion at 
suffering in a moral sphere. The situation in which 
Jesus found himself demands faith rather than 
logic. He saw no Reign of Terror in God's king- 
dom. He drew trust in love from his own sense of 
divine sonship. It was because of his inner experi- 
ence of God as Father that he drank the cup in 
Gethsemane. 

(2) But self-devotion to an ideal and trust in a 
loving God are not all that can be seen in the vicari- 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 1 99 

ous sufiFering of Jesus. The question still remains 
whether he was not after all another in the long 
line of victims, and the consequent fear lest the life 
of love which he chose as the only possible expres- 
sion of his sense of God's presence is really weaker 
than the life of hatred that hung him on the cross. 
At this point we pass from the faith of Jesus to the 
objective facts of his history. 

True, such a question can in part be answered 
by the response which our best selves make to any- 
thing that is fine and heroic. The very uprising of 
the progressively realized spiritual life within us 
leads us instinctively to feel that it is better to fol- 
low an ideal to the cross than to retreat with creature 
comfort to the Governor's palace. In part, too, it 
can be answered by the service which the Christian 
community has been inspired by his self-devotion 
to render to society. But even thus we are not 
quite content. The modern man, as we have 
already seen, is sorely tempted to doubt even such 
judgments of ultimate value. And here the his- 
torical Jesus does indeed help us to freedom. The 
gospel breeds new confidence in the supremacy of 
the spiritual life even though it submits to vicarious 
suffering by presenting the risen Jesus. He is no 
longer a dead Christ; he is the risen Christ who 



200 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

died. His resurrection is not set forth by the 
apostles as an unrelated wonder. It is to them the 
dramatic exposition of the fact that though he 
suffer the worst sin can inflict, a man is not thereby 
necessarfly defeated. If only his spiritual life is in 
right relations with God he is forgiven and trium- 
phant over death itself. 

For what is the forgiveness of sins? Juristically 
considered it is the remission of penalty due not 
only to individual sins but to human nature itself. 
But what is remission of penalty from the point of 
view of the presuppositions of modern thinking? 
It must be something more than the mere abroga- 
tion of punishment attached to the breaking of 
statutes. Punishment in the moral sphere is not 
external to the wrongdoer. We have passed the 
stage of a forensic theology. The forgiveness of 
sins means that in the personal sphere wrongdoing 
can be prevented from resulting in its otherwise 
inevitable suffering. Mechanical analogies are here 
superior to forensic, for we know that one force 
may be offset and so rendered inoperative by an- 
other. But mechanical analogies themselves are 
imperfect. In sin we are dealing with a diseased 
personality, and in forgiveness we see the cure of 
that which is diseased by the establishment of a 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 20I 

new situation from which flow new and regenerate 
personal outcomes in the place of those which other- 
wise would have flowed from the sinful soul. 

To have a life strong enough through personal 
relations with God to overpower the force of the 
*'body of death," the survivals of animalism, in the 
moral realm, is to have a life also strong enough to 
overcome its other result, death. The Christlike 
spiritual life is thus triumphant in man's entire 
personality. And that is what the modern man 
means by the divine forgiveness of which the earthly 
is so poor an analogy. It is a dynamic, a regener- 
ating reconciliation. 

This is one message of the resurrection of the 
crucified Christ. He stands forth as the very epit- 
ome and absolute type of what humanity is when 
forgiven. That generically human nature which 
was his was transformed because of the divine 
presence. He not only conquered sin in the region 
of conduct; he conquered death by surpassing the 
inherited physical nature from which sin springs. 
In a sense far truer than the realists among the 
schoolmen saw, in Jesus humanity was submitting 
to humanity's ultimate test. And it showed itself 
forgivable, not only in that Christ never yielded to 
the backward pull which was implicit in his very 



202 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

humanity, but also in that by his resurrection there 
was exhibited the actual outcome in spiritual life 
of a union with God which forgiveness promises. 
The gospel is profoundly psychological in insisting 
that forgiveness must mean more than assurance of 
pardon and peace of soul. It must mean also the 
concrete effects of a reconciliation of two personali- 
ties to be seen in the outcome of the development 
of the weaker personality. And the ultimate out- 
come of a personality whose spiritual life has re- 
sponded to and so is filled with God, both the New 
Testament and the modern man can see in the 
character and the resurrection of the Jesus who 
tasted the bitterness of death. 

3. But our premises carry us one step farther 
into that which is objective. In the death and 
resurrection of Jesus God is revealed as an ethical 
unity. That is the answer to the fundamental 
philosophical question raised by the gospel — the 
question of whether God can be ''just" and the 
"justifier" of those who accept Him. To its solu- 
tion every theory of the atonement that is more 
than that of exemplary martyrdom has addressed 
itself. Each one of them tries to enforce upon those 
who share in its presuppositions that the moral order 
is eternal. Sin is not less dangerous, God is not 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SEN - 203 

more lenient, because of the saving work of Jesus. 
In so far as Christ really individualized the imma- 
nent God did he exhibit in his experience the loving 
character of Him who established and sustains the 
process which attaches misery to sin. In his ex- 
perience we see that such suffering is the sterner 
side of the divine self -manifestation in humanity. 
God is not indulgent in his forgiveness. He does 
not reverse his universe in order to check that suf- 
fering even though it pass upon so pure and in- 
nocent a soul as Jesus. Therein is set forth "the 
judgment of sin in the flesh," the awfulness of sin 
in a socially united world. However faint may be 
our confidence even in our own formulas, we can 
see in the experience of Jesus the worth and mean- 
ing of such a love. And in that assurance the 
sense of guilt born of a social experience in which 
law has become a universal presupposition, vanishes. 
Suffering is seen first, but love is seen supreme. 
While it is true we cannot see why man was so 
constituted that moral development brings suffer- 
ing upon its leaders, we can see that the forces 
which compel such suffering, while immutable be- 
cause the expression o^ God's will, are not supreme, 
but are rather only the tragic concomitants of 
that power of progress towards the spiritual which 



204 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

argues and reveals divine presence and divine love. 
God as revealed in the dying and risen Jesus is seen 
to be ethically at one. To see this and to believe 
it is for the man who seeks to live the Christlike 
spiritual life of love and faith and service to lose 
all sense of fear and guilt. 

4. This revelation of ethical imity in a God 
who is both law and love, justice and forgiveness, 
does not argue that the two qualities are coordinate. 
The Christian conception of God, confirmed and 
illuminated by a doctrine of the atonement, is one in 
which love is really supreme. As has already ap- 
peared, from such a point of view alone do we find 
unity in the process of the universe and particularly 
in humanity's struggle upward against sin and evil 
towards a spiritual life like Christ's. How much 
truer is it that only from such a point of view do 
We find an explanation of that which the gospel 
reveals as salvation. Love which is the supreme 
quality of the spiritual life in humanity is but the 
imperfect reflection of the Love which has been 
revealed in the Son. But it is a Love which expresses 
itself not alone in the single moment of the death 
of Jesus, but, as the gospel always insists, in the 
entire relationship of God and man revealed and 
"chaptered up," as Paul says, in Jesus. ''The 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 205 

lamb was slain before the foundation of the world" 
— this evangelic formula forever disabuses our 
thought of the death of Christ as an appendix of 
the work of God in creation and development in 
either the natural or the spiritual order. " God so 
loved the world that He gave his only begotten son 
to save the world" — this is the evangelic formula 
for the ultimate interpretation of the purpose of the 
entire life of Jesus. Love divine in him stooped 
to share in human weakness for the purpose of 
carrying on that work which humanity unaided 
could never hope to realize. In this love that seeks 
to save at the cost of its own suffering do we see 
the supreme and final meaning of the death of 
Christ. He stands not over against God, seeking to 
mitigate divine severity, but as the very embodi- 
ment of a love that dares suffer to protect its own 
law-abiding nature. And in his perception of such 
divine sympathy and fellow-suffering the modem 
man, even more than his brethren, makes his own 
the words of Paul — who in all the agony and sin- 
fulness of life deemed himself more than conqueror 
through Him that loved us — "For I am persuaded 
that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor princi- 
palities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor 
powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, 



2o6 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

shall be able to separate us from the love of God 
which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." 

VII 

Such an estimate of Jesus as removing all sense of 
guilt by his revelation of the actuality of forgiveness 
and the ethical unity and sympathy of God, reem- 
phasizes the truth that what the gospel calls the for- 
giveness of sin is really the negative side of what it 
also calls positively the new life in Christ. A really 
Christian soteriology must be vital as well as moral. 
Its different aspects may be expressed by innumerable 
figures, but the central fact itself must be more than 
figure. Grounding as we do our view of sin in the 
teaching given us by so many sciences that the indi- 
vidual is a mass of survivals which tend to reassert 
themselves, it is plain that in forgiveness we are deal- 
ing with the emancipated spiritual life rather than 
the removal of superimposed sentences. The Greek 
fathers here saw more clearly than the Latin. The 
deeper we probe sin the nearer do we find ourselves 
coming to the problems of life and death and the 
more are we convinced that any salvation that is 
more than empty definition must involve all aspects 
of personality. The gospel insists that we cannot 
stop simply in the region of release from punishment, 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 207 

but must press on to appreciate the further and more 
positive message of the regeneration of the per- 
sonality itself. The gospel is not only reasonable, 
it is dynamic. And the sinless, risen Jesus is the 
concrete embodiment of the realities it contains. 
Without him as a real person in history, belief in 
the consonance of the spiritual life with the natural 
order and confidence in its supremacy to that order, 
would be but a justifiable hope and a working 
hypothesis. Possessed of him this belief becomes a 
faith that will move mountains. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE DELIVERANCE FROM DEATH 

Death, like life, is without definition. Physiolo- 
gists may tell us what they hope to discover, but they 
can only tell us their hopes. We know that certain 
chemical processes cease and certain others begin, 
but we know little else as to what happens when a 
man dies. For this if for no other reason humanity 
would hate death ; but there is a deeper reason for 
such hatred. There is the elemental impulse in all 
living organisms to protect the generic life of which 
they are a part; and this passion to perpetuate life, 
either of the organism itself or by the way of de- 
scendants, lies back of more of the elements of our 
civilization than at first appear. 

But humanity sees even more in death than a break 
in the continuity of physical life. It wonders what 
becomes of the personality. From the very moment 
when primitive man first stood beside his dead the 
question of the future has returned to turn mourning 
to bitterness. Every man knows that death awaits 
both him and those he loves. The answer of the race 
to this fact has been a challenge to death. Account 

208 



THE DELIVERANCE FROM DEATH 209 

for the belief in immortality as you will, it is deep in 

the heart of the race. 

I 

The Hebrew saw little more than the darker side 
of death. His dead he believed had gone into Sheol, 
the great pit below the earth, and there they lived a 
shadowy, gray life, without interests, longing for the 
richer life they had left. Later, the Jew came to 
think of Sheol as of something more than a place of 
abode and imagined it divided into four great sec- 
tions : the most miserable for sinners who had been 
happy on earth ; the most blessed for the righteous 
who had been miserable upon earth; and between 
these extremes, two other regions, one for the sinners 
who had been miserable and the other for the right- 
eous who had been happy in life. But hatred of his 
enemies as well as his persistent sense of moral fitness 
led him to describe the first section or place of pun- 
ishment more distinctly. To his imagination it 
became a lake of fire prepared in the first instance 
for the giants who were the children of the fallen 
angels and the daughters of men, but also the place 
of torment for demons and all those who had op- 
pressed Israel. 

I. This awful future was brought into relationship 
with death. There was misery before the suffering 



2IO THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

set by the sentence of the Judgment Day. All, 
whether bad or good, for a time were disembodied. 
Souls were naked in Sheol awaiting that great Day 
of Judgment in which the wicked were to be sent to 
the punishments of hell and the righteous should be 
called upward to assume new bodies and enter the 
glorious new kingdonl which, already in heaven, was 
to be established upon the earth. Such a conception 
of resurrection of the individual sprang from a belief 
in the resurgence of the nation. All Jews were to 
have a part in the blessing of the messianic reign. 
Sometimes the hope grew very materialistic. The 
righteous were to have eternal life, says the Enoch 
literature, were to live five hundred years and have 
four hundred children. The fruits of the earth were 
to be indefinitely increased and there was to be in- 
calculable wealth of grain and wine. 

It would not be fair, however, to say that the Jew 
uniformly believed in the resurrection of the flesh. 
The words of Josephus imply that the new bodies 
into which the Pharisees believed the soul of the 
righteous were to enter might be something very 
different from those that were flesh. The entire 
scope of Pharisaism would seem also to argue that its 
conception of the resurrection had moved out from 
the purely physical to something like a transcen- 
dental conception. 



THE DELIVERANCE FROM DEATH 211 

2. It is this conception that to some extent at least 
reappears in the Christian doctrine of the resurrec- 
tion. The eschatology of the New Testament com- 
bines after the fashion of the Jewish Apocalypses two 
great conceptions : the resurrection of the individual, 
and the establishment of a new social order. Of the 
latter we shall speak presently. We are now con- 
cerned with the former element. Bare immortality 
in the sense of a mere continuous existence of the 
personality after death is not the evangelic doctrine. 
That is far more specific. The resurrection of the 
dead as it is presented by Jesus both in the synoptic 
and in the Johannine teaching is clearly more than 
physical reanimation. Those who attain to it are 
neither to marry nor to be given in marriage, and 
Paul emphatically declared that flesh and blood can- 
not inherit the kingdom of God, but that the new 
body which awaits the Christian dead is a spiritual 
body. Such a great change is really a deliverance 
from death as well as from Sheol. That is to say, 
the state of the personality which death established 
is to be ended and the loss of the physical organism 
is to be met by the gift of another better adjusted to 
spiritual environment. 

Distinct as this gospel is, it is no more so than the 
teaching as to the basis on which this body of the 



212 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

resurrection is obtained. It is the outcome of the 
transformation of the human personality through the 
presence of God, the Holy Spirit. A man is not only 
saved morally in the sense that he was given strength 
to resist temptation, but he is to be saved, if we may 
use the term, in a biological psychological sense. 

Such a conception sprang directly from that of 
death as the punishment of sin. To save a man from 
sin is to save him from the consequence of sin and 
sinfulness. So much, as we have seen, was revealed 
in the experience of Jesus. The work of God in the 
soul was held to be regenerating not because a man 
thereby gained immortality, for it seems to have been 
all but universally believed that all men survived 
death in the sense that their shades went to Sheol, 
but in the sense of an advance through death to 
a higher, more spiritual life. The gospel properly 
interpreted is something more than a series of naive 
promises of heaven to good people and hell to bad 
people. There is in it a genetic conception accord- 
ing to which the future state of a personality is con- 
ditioned by the adjustment of such personality to 
the normal and dynamic situation created between 
God and itself through the act of faith. He would 
be a very superficial interpreter who failed to see 
that this was an essential part of the gospel conception 



THE DELIVERANCE FROM DEATH 213 

of salvation. The difficulty of expressing it in terms 
of a scientific vocabulary is, of course, evident. But 
however expressed, the hope is fundamental in the 
gospel. It is one thing to survive death ; it is another 
thing to share in the resurrection. The one is static ; 
the other is progressive. The Christian doctrine 
of immortality is a phase of the Christian doctrine 
of the evolution of the free spiritual personality. 
Such an advance away from the conditions set by 
merely animal existence to those set by more spiritual 
environment can be enjoyed only by those who are in 
proper relationship with the constructive forces of 
the spiritual order. Sin by its very nature is a lack 
of such harmony with God as makes for the develop- 
ment of the personality away from that which it holds 
in common with the beast. Sin, therefore, is some- 
thing more than what we conventionally call an 
ethical quality. It carries within itself forces of 
degeneration which death completes. The gospel 
teaches that chief among the results of this devolution 
are, negatively, the failure to experience the resurrec- 
tion in the Christian sense; and second, positively, 
the suffering which comes from the unnatural rela- 
tionship with God. It is true that in one or two 
cases the New Testament speaks of the resurrection 
of condemnation, but the reference here is to some- 



214 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN , 

thing other than the resurrection of the body. It is 
rather to the summoning of all souls from Sheol for 
the purpose of judgment at the bar of God, an ele- 
ment of the eschatological program that Christianity 
inherited from Jewish cosmology. Mere existence 
was not a good to Paul. That which he longed for 
and which he believed all sane men longed for was a 
higher type of life which drew joy and peace and 
noblest development from the normal, spiritual rela- 
tionship of the soul with God; and this obviously 
could be possible only to those who had experienced 
the great reconciliation. 

II 

To a considerable extent these general conceptions 
of the New Testament are independent of the his- 
toricity of the resurrection of Jesus, but their in- 
fluence upon human lives and so their real place in 
theology are in point of fact controlled by the disci- 
ples' belief in the reality of that event. The modem 
man, however, finds himself in a very different atti- 
tude of mind from that of the early disciples. Where 
a belief in individual immortality exists among the 
scientific and philosophic classes it is Greek rather 
than Jewish. Indeed it is undeniable that many 
modern thinkers find it difficult to conceive of im- 



THE DELIVERANCE FROM DEATH 21 5 

mortality except in terms of society or of impersonal 
influence or of the absorption of the individual soul 
into the Whole. It is not strange, therefore, that 
with such views on the one side and with a suspicion 
of all miracles on the other, the resurrection of Jesus, 
so far from helping the modern man as it did the 
apostles to focus and give content to existing ideas 
or expectations of immortality, should rather prove 
an element of the gospel most difficult to accept. 

We have here another illustration of the failure to 
see that the gospel is something other than the mass of 
opinions and dogmas which have grown up about it. 
In particular do we have an illustration of the fact 
that men allow their a priori objections to forestall 
the results of historical criticism. Looked at in the 
large, the refusal of our modern world to accept the 
Christian evangelic hope of the resurrection is due 
to the very simple belief that in the nature of the case 
such a hope is impossible of realization. This ob- 
jection, although involving the old suspicion of what- 
ever is contrary to uniform experience, really goes 
a step farther and estops the plea in rebuttal that 
uniform experience has its exceptions. It seems 
necessary therefore to consider the a priori objection 
to immortality before considering the resurrection 
of Jesus. 



2l6 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

T. A belief in immortality is a legitimate outcome 
of what we know of life. 

I do no mean to argue that a dissecting table is a 
platform from which to peer into heaven, or that the 
conception of life as a purely physical and chemical 
process conduces to a conviction that it can continue 
after such process has ceased. Nor would I use 
the term in the sense of a principle which exists as an 
independent force in the universe, although one 
could plead great names for such a view. I would 
use the term rather in a broader and I must confess a 
less defined sense. This, however, is by no means to 
ruin my case. The word is admittedly without defi- 
nition, a sort of ideograph picturing a group of phe- 
nomena the causes of which are not yet thoroughly 
known. But this much seems clear; However life 
originated it has been constantly struggling to ex- 
press itself in more complicated forms and in ways 
less dependent on what, for lack of a better term, we 
can call impersonal forces. That is, it grows more 
personal and individual. It is the at least partial 
possession of these latter qualities that distinguishes 
men from their animal kindred. Our vocabularies at 
this point are likely to be misleading, but whatever 
else life may include in humanity it is far more 
elaborate and self-directive than in the beast or the 



THE DELIVERANCE FROM DEATH 21 7 

plant. Human personality as an expression of life 
has in itself irresistible impulses to express itself in 
still other and less materialistic forms. It makes 
little difference whether we call this personal life a 
spirit or simply a new aspect of life itself. There is 
in every man a quality we call spiritual, — a quality 
in a striking way to be described by the theist as in 
the image of God. This spiritual life is that to which 
all the past seems to point, and this it is that is the 
seat of whatever creative freedom humanity has. And 
this spiritual life is ever struggling to more complete 
self-expression, — a fact recognized by all attempts at 
psychological analysis as well as by every attempt at 
formulating the impulse to moral idealism. It is as 
impossible to say why life struggles thus to transfer 
itself into higher and ultimately more spiritual terms 
as to say why it seeks to propagate and protect 
itself; but to recognize such an impulse is only to 
take account of that which really is. 

Now a belief in immortality insists that this process 
is assisted by the death of the physical organism. 
It holds that as in the history of that life there have 
constantly been developed types which are ever less 
dependent on purely material situations, there comes 
a time when, in terms of the spiritual personality, it 
is sufficiently individualized to be completely superior 



2i8 THE Gospel and the modern man 

to the physical organism. However far we are as 
yet from imderstanding the relationship of spiritual 
life with the physical, we have come far enough to 
recognize that the moral and aesthetic and rational 
powers of the personality are something very different 
from the physical life from which they have sprung. 
Embryology, in either the physical or the spiritual 
realms, is not to be confused with physiology. 

2. The most serious answer to such a priori argu- 
ments as these for the persistence of personality seems 
to me to come from the side of sociology. And this 
reply is in brief that such a new stage in the process 
through which humanity is passing means the devel- 
opment of a higher genus rather than the perpetuation 
and development of the individual himself. And 
it must be admitted that such an objection has great 
weight. But at bottom it is a matter of the interpre- 
tation of process itself. Is the end to which evolution 
tends the individual or the group ? It would seem to 
me that there can be only one answer : the ultimate 
of the evolutionary process is the completed free indi- 
vidual. That is to say, a personality that finds its 
completed self-expression not in a physical, but in a 
spiritual, more completely personal situation. The 
history of humanity itself seems to warrant such an 
interpretation. For social institutions have never 



THE DELIVERANCE FROM DEATH 219 

been ends in themselves. Men have tried to make 
them such, but invariably there has arisen above the 
institutional interpretation of society that more crea- 
tive impulse to see in humanity persons on the way 
to free individuality rather than a new race. He has 
always been regarded the most nearly perfect man 
who has proved himself most superior to the physical 
and imperfectly personal forces in which he finds him- 
self involved. From such a point of view death is a 
new birth. The personality reached in our moment 
of physical life is, so to speak, the embryo of that new 
stage which is made possible by the emancipation ot 
self from the survival of the strictly physiological as- 
pects of the process. Indeed, were it not that obser- 
vation is so much more difficult, it would be hardly 
more perplexing to see how a life like Jesus' can per- 
sist through the change of death than how it persisted 
through the change of birth. The paraphrase of 
Professor Royce sums up the whole matter: "This 
mortal must put on individuality." 

3. Nor is this quite all that can be said. Men of 
science are very properly cautious as to speculations 
regarding the subconscious or subliminal self, but a 
review of the psychological tendencies of the past ten 
or a dozen years will show that, despite such caution, 
the belief that the self is more than its conscious 



220 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

states has gained steady acceptance. Questions of 
terminology cannot obscure this fact. Whatever 
term may be used, whether the soul be regarded as 
an infinitely etherized matter or as spirit, it is no 
longer permissible to doubt that the self has qualities 
and potencies which are other than those which used 
to make the definitions of the soul. Below its out- 
cropping in the conscious act or thought or emotion, 
there is the great ledge of personality. 

Difficult as is the method of its investigation, this 
subconscious — I use the word only for lack of a 
better — must form one element of every formula 
of personality. On it an argument for immortality 
can be and has been grounded. For its existence is a 
constant reminder that the self cannot be conceived 
of as a mere aggregation of conscious states and that 
in this deeper, more spiritual unity there lie powers 
which may very easily be conceived to survive those 
conditions which make the separate states of con- 
sciousness possible. That is to say, the self in other 
conditions than those set by the nervous organism 
might give rise to states of consciousness, wholly re- 
gardless of memory in the ordinary physiological 
sense of the term. Who of us remembers his in- 
fancy? And yet our stream of consciousness is 
unbroken. 



THE DELIVERANCE FROM DEATH 221 

I am well aware that much of this is speculation. 
It could not well be more. But it is none the less a 
speculation very different from that with which 
Socrates would prove immortality in terms of preex- 
istence, for it at least follows a trail whose beginnings 
have been blazed by psychology. And as speculation 
it is calculated to break down the other speculation 
by which it is asserted that immortality is a priori 
impossible. In fact, with all due regard to the un- 
certainty of the nature of immortality and without 
sanctioning all or indeed any of the particular hy- 
potheses which have been derived from this theory of 
the subliminal self, it seems to me beyond question 
that we are to-day as never before in a position to 
recognize the reasonableness of a genuine Christian 
doctrine of immortality at least as a working hy- 
pothesis. Having reached this point, the belief of 
the disciples in the resurrection of Jesus and their 
hope of their own appear far more tenable. 

4. In the minds of many people this is as far as one 
can safely go in the region of antecedent possibilities. 
But there are others, of whom I confess I am one, who 
find in themselves a growing readiness to believe that 
sooner or later the existence of the human personality 
after death will become a matter of experiment. The 
work of the Society of Psychical Research and its 



222 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

allied organizations can hardly be said to have re- 
sulted in convincing conclusions, but it has at least 
raised questions which suggest positive rather than 
negative answers. We certainly have not reached the 
limit of that which can be known, but our ignorance 
is no longer unillumined by hope. The human soul 
can no longer be regarded as a function of the brain, 
and telepathy and hypernormal communications 
may yet reveal to us the truth and the meaning of 
those doctrines which have long been based on hope 
alone. At all events it can hardly be denied that the 
question of immortality is passing from the region of 
religion in the ordinary sense of the word to that of 
science. Sooner or later the view of science, what- 
ever that may be, will here prevail among modem 
men. The desire for immortality will hardly be 
taken always as conclusive evidence of a life after 
death. That view alone can be regarded as final 
which is determined by our knowledge of the human 
personality. And even now such a knowledge bids 
men pause before saying that personal energy is to 
be conserved only by being transformed into me- 
chanical and chemical forces. Values persist as 
truly as electrons. 

But to my mind this is to say that we may dare hope 
that one of these days we shall find science doing for 



THE DELIVERANCE FROM DEATH 223 

the doctrine of immortality what it has done for our 
conception of creation ; namely, furnish the religious 
mind with clear evidence of the presence of reason 
and law in human history and destiny. And al- 
though I question much of his ''evidence," I find 
myself responding to these words of the late F. W. H. 
Myers : — 

"I venture now on a bold saying ; for I predict that, in 
consequence of the new evidence, all reasonable men, a cen- 
tury hence, wHl believe the resurrection of Christ, whereas 
in default of the new evidence, no reasonable man, a century 
hence, would have believed it. The ground of this forecast 
is plain enough. Our ever growing recognition of the continu- 
ity, the uniformity of cosmic law has gradually made of the 
alleged uniqueness of any incident its almost inevitable refuta- 
tion. Ever more clearly must our age of science realize that 
any relation between a material and a spiritual world cannot 
be an ethical or emotional relation alone; that it must needs be 
a great structural fact of the universe, involving laws at least 
as persistent and identical from age to age as our known 
laws of energy or of motion." 

Ill 

Let us then look at the resurrection of Jesus from 
the point of view not of that which could not be, but 
of that which, not antecedently impossible, was or 
was not according to reliability of evidence. Im- 
mediately we see that we are by no means so stricken 



224 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

with poverty of such evidence as it has sometimes 
been alleged. The oldest documents which we have 
in Christianity, the letters of Paul, center about the 
fact and describe the evidence on which Paul ac- 
cepted it. This is by no means that of one person, 
but of hundreds of persons, most of whom still lived 
at the time when Paul wrote. The stories of the 
resurrection in the gospels must have originated 
during the lifetime of those very persons who could 
have denied their existence. And it is to be borne in 
mind that the sources of these gospel records of the 
resurrection-faith are not derived one from the other, 
but are almost without exception independent of 
each other, thus representing the faith of Chris- 
tians scattered over a very wide geographical 
area. 

I. If we start with that which is no longer seriously 
denied even by negative critics, viz. that the early 
Christians honestly believed they had seen Jesus 
after his crucifixion, the only really vital question 
before us is whether or not they were deceived. At 
this point a man is certain to turn to his presupposi- 
tions. If one believes that it is more probable that 
they were deceived than that they saw what they 
said they saw, the argument is closed, except as one 
may attack that major premise by asking : Why is it 



THE DELIVERANCE FROM DEATH 225 

more improbable? The answer can only be, be- 
cause it is contrary to the ordinary run of human ex- 
perience — and we are back again on the ground of 
Hume ; a position which as I have tried to show is 
steadily growing less tenable. How, if there were no 
facts to warrant its rise, are we to account for this 
faith of the disciples — a faith which antedates the 
organization of the church ; a faith which is older than 
any Christian theology ; a faith which grew up in the 
midst of the very generation and in the very city in 
which the events were believed to have taken place ? 

2. There have been a variety of hypotheses with 
which to account for the origin of the belief. We have 
been told that Jesus was not dead; that he simply 
swooned and was brought to consciousness in the cool 
tomb. But this involves so many difficulties as to 
have been abandoned by all serious students. 

We have been told that the disciples deliberately 
concocted the story for selfish ends. This, too, has 
passed away as lying outside of that which is reason- 
able. 

We have been told that the Egyptians believed in 
the resurrection of Osiris and the Syrians in the resur- 
rection of Tammuz, and the Assyrians in the recall 
of Ishtah's husband from Sheol. 

We have had the disciples' belief referred to sun 

Q 



226 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

myths and spring myths, and in fact to every sort 
of myth that the student of comparative religion 
has been able to discover. Just at present we have as 
a suggested explanation that the belief in the resur- 
rection was due to a combination in the disciples* 
minds of auto-suggestion, religious faith, value 
judgments, mob psychology, and the messianic hope, 
the hypothesis being buttressed by reference to 
legends as to the alleged resurrections of Saints. 

3. I do not think I underestimate the difficulties 
which lie in the belief in the resurrection as an histori- 
cal fact. I am not prepared to deny that there may 
be secondary additions in the gospels as they now 
stand; but after all reasonable allowance has been 
made, after the story of the resurrection has been 
brought to its oldest form as we find it in the Pauline 
documents, I must frankly say that for me all of these 
explanations are more difficult than that which they 
would explain. They refuse in the first place to 
acknowledge in Jesus, in whom men find the worth 
of God, any more power than they see in Socrates ; 
in the second place they assume that it is impossible 
for any communication between the dead and the 
living to take place ; in the third place they practically 
assume that immortality in itself is an open question ; 
and in the fourth place they assume that it would 



THE DELIVERANCE FROM DEATH 227 

have been possible for hundreds of men and women 
so to deceive themselves, not consciously, but from 
the excess of love and faith, as to believe that the 
one, who had disappointed all their hopes, had given 
the lie to their messianic expectations, and had become 
the victim of their enemies, had appeared after death, 
had ascended to God, and was to come again to 
establish the kingdom which he had once failed to 
establish. And finally, as if to intensify the diffi- 
culties, they insist that the faith thus cruelly defeated 
was so strong that when its possessors came together 
it developed an auto-suggestion which was visualized 
into a form so distinct and commanding as to become 
the basis of a religion. For my own part, in view of 
the weakening of the antecedent improbability of 
personal immortality, I would rather make a working 
hypothesis of the disciples' experiences as trustworthy 
rather than of such highly subjective conjectures, 
however much they may claim the support of a 
scientific vocabulary. 

And this conviction is strengthened as one recalls 
that the chief witness, Paul, who claims to have seen 
Jesus himself, was himself subject to visions. He 
therefore knew the difference between an experience 
of the risen Christ and those other experiences, such 
as that one in which he is said to have been caught 



228 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

up in the third heaven. In fact, the entire history 
of the apostolic church affords data which make it 
evident that the very persons who believed in visions 
and dreams made a distinction between such ex- 
perience and the appearance of the risen Christ; 
They were, so to speak, connoisseurs in visions, and 
their testimony to the fact that their experiences of 
Jesus were more objective than that of their visions is 
in a fashion that of experts. ] 

IV 

But in what did they believe these experiences 
consisted? In other words, what does the gospel 
mean by the resurrection? 

I. The point of departure for any investigation of 
such a difficult matter is the writings of Paul, particu- 
larly the fifteenth chapter of i Corinthians and the 
fifth chapter of 2 Corinthians. From these chapters 
it is apparent that Paul did not believe that the Jesus 
who appeared to him was flesh and blood. Flesh 
and blood, he declares, cannot inherit the kingdom of 
God. It is also apparent that he finds it impossible to 
give even a quasi-scientific description of what the 
body of the resurrection is to be. For when that ques- 
tion is raised he at once proceeds to argue by analogy 
that it is to be different from the body that is 



THE DELIVERANCE FROM DEATH 229 

"sown." More positively he declares it to be a spir- 
itual body. 

In their present forms, our gospels are later than 
the writings of Paul, and in all four we have accounts 
which are much more concrete. The difference 
between their views and the views of Paul must have 
been as evident to the early Christians as they are to 
us, but would doubtless be explained on the supposi- 
tion that the Jesus who appeared to Paul was the 
Jesus who had ascended to heaven, while the Jesus 
who appeared to the disciples on the first Easter 
and during the forty days had not yet "ascended to 
the Father." And such a view has at least this justi- 
fication : if the Jesus who liad appeared to Paul had 
been in precisely the same form as the Jesus who is 
reported to have appeared to Mary Magdalene and 
Peter, it is probable that when he raised the question 
as to the nature of the spiritual body Paul would 
have referred directly to the body of that Jesus who 
was to him the first fruits of those who sleep. 

Yet the words of Paul are not altogether out of 
harmony with those of the four gospels, and any his- 
torical method must proceed from those elements 
which are common to all the gospels to those which 
are peculiar to different narratives. Any resulting 
discrepancies may then be tested by the Pauline con- 
ception as that which is critically the oldest. 



230 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

2. In such a procedure it becomes at once apparent 
that all of the gospels look upon the risen Jesus as 
possessed of certain powers quite unlike those pos- 
sessed by him before death. True, the gospels con- 
ceive some sort of identity between the body of the 
risen Jesus and the body that was laid in the tomb, 
and to this the position taken by Paul in i Corinthians 
can hardly be said to be opposed. But the resurrec- 
tion of Jesus was not of a sort with the raising from 
the dead of Jairus' daughter and the widow's son and 
Lazarus. In each of these three cases we have not 
resurrection but simply the reanimation of the old 
life. Every one of the three was to die again. In the 
case of Jesus, however, the resurrection was not to be 
followed by death and was more than reanimation. 
It involved some sort of passage from the purely 
physical to a higher form of life less subject to the 
limitations of the physical world, more personal be- 
cause more spiritual. 

It is customary among some scholars to make a 
sharp distinction between the mode of existence of 
Jesus during the forty days subsequent to his resur- 
rection and that mode in which he is believed now to 
be existing. That is to say, they regard the forty 
days as a period of gradual transformation of the 
body from the fleshly to the spiritual body. The 



THE DELIVERANCE FROM DEATH 23 1 

modem man is likely to be critical of such a hy- 
pothesis, and yet if he once asserts that the faith of the 
New Testament is not wholly one of misapprehension 
he must at least treat it with respect; for it is an at- 
tempt at constructive theory. On the one side, al- 
though the empty tomb does not seem to be absolutely 
demanded by the Pauline conception of the resurrec- 
tion, it is clear enough that the earliest stratum of the 
resurrection hope presupposed a belief that the body 
had disappeared. But by whom was it removed? 
The ancient tradition is that the Pharisees charged 
the disciples with removing it; but such a charge 
is absurd on the face of it. Did then the Pharisees 
remove it? So some claim. But what was to be 
gained by such an act? It is, of course, true that 
a priori argument at a distance of nineteen hundred 
years is precarious, but the difficulty of explaining 
away the ancient belief in the empty tomb should at 
least suggest some hesitation on the part of those 
men who would summarily wash the entire matter 
off the slate of history. 

The fundamental fact is that the early disciples had 
some sort of experience of Jesus after his death. 
This simple fact is as evangelic as it seems critically 
assured. It is impossible for me, with what knowledge 
I have been able to gain of the pre-Christian messi- 



232 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

anic hope, to see how the belief in the resurrection 
could have sprung from the disciples' faith in Jesus 
as Christ. Rather the contrary is true. Facts 
compelled the belief; it was not created by the faith. 
When it comes, however, to the shaping up of any 
absolutely self -consistent explanation as to what these 
experiences really were, it is mere elemental honesty 
to say that such explanation lies beyond our power. 
We certainly cannot uncritically mass the gospel ac- 
counts into such a theory. At any rate no scholar 
has ever succeeded in the attempt. But such an im- 
possibility, I am sure, arises from our ignorance of 
the soul and the nature of human personality on the 
one side and the whole field of supernormal experi- 
ence on the other. If it should ever be shown more 
clearly than it is to-day that in certain nervous condi- 
tions human beings are unusually susceptible to 
super-physical influences, we might in such a fact 
find a clew that would be worth following. At all 
events it does not seem to me to be in any way un- 
likely that some partial hypothesis will some day be 
forthcoming. In the meantime it is not necessary 
to wait upon the invention of new terms or the ability 
to explain fully an experience that is well attested 
as actual historical fact. 

4. It is sometimes argued that the belief in the 



THE DELIVERANCE FROM DEATH 233 

resurrection of Jesus as anything more than a purely 
subjective experience carries with it corresponding 
belief in the "levitation'' of Jesus. Undoubtedly 
such is a possible inference from the New Testament 
records, but after all the sting of "levitation" lies in 
the belief that the early Christian Church held to a 
physical disappearance of a flesh and bone Jesus 
in heaven. That is to be denied. "Resurrection" 
and "ascension" are not identical turns. It was not 
the earthly body Jesus that disappeared in heaven, 
according to the faith of the early disciples ; it was the 
transformed body. Even if they regarded the resur- 
rection at its inception as physical, the ascended Christ 
was the Lord the Spirit. This may not make the mat- 
ter any more scientifically intelligible, but it certainly 
makes the primitive faith self-consistent. How- 
ever we may account for the story of the ascension 
it is undeniable that in a few weeks (except in the case 
of Paul) the experiences of the risen Christ ceased 
and in their place came that spiritual enthusiasm 
and invigoration which the New Testament calls the 
"giftof the Spirit." 

5. In any conclusion it is well to call to mind that in 
the expectation of the early church the remarkable 
thing in the resurrection of Jesus was not that he 
alone of all mankind was to experience that great 



234 THE GOSPEL AND TH^ MODERN MAN 

change. All the Christians expected the same in the 
Day of Judgment. The really remarkable thing was 
that he had showed himself alive after his passion to 
his followers; that is to say, before the Day of Judg- 
ment which they expected, he had had power suffi- 
cient to break across the boundary of death and to 
impress himself in some way upon those who were 
in particularly sympathetic relationship with him. 
In him the triumph of the spiritual life is seen in the 
realm of physical forces as it had been already seen in 
the realm of morals. As Paul so strikingly declared, 
he had brought life and incorruption to light. 

■ V 

I. It must be admitted that such a position as this 
which I have outlined, with its frank admission of in- 
ability to form a scientifically precise statement as to 
the actual nature of the resurrection, may serve to 
disbar it from acceptance by those who on the one 
hand find no difiiculty in taking the New Testament 
stories at their face value, and on the other by those 
who refuse to accept testimony as to any fact which 
does not permit, through experimentation, undoubted 
and complete correlation with our existing knowledge. 
Like all attempts at finding the common divisor in 
conflicting evidence, it is likely to be rejected by 



THE DELIVERANCE FROM DEATH 235 

divergent parties. But after all what does the reli- 
gious man really demand in the case? Can he not 
believe in the genuineness of some sort of a well- 
attested experience of Jesus on the part of disciples 
without knowing whether the risen Master ate fish 
or kindled a fire? The sublime truth that stands 
out in the resurrection of Jesus is the emancipation 
of the spiritual life from the physical order as 
culminating in death, not information as to physio- 
logical details. 

Even those scholars who now doubt the explana- 
tion given by the apostles to their undoubtedly his- 
torical experience are at one in insisting that their 
own confidence in immortality is largely derived 
from the gospel message; and that is something 
which is not to be underestimated. The story of the 
resurrection of Jesus is not meant to satisfy our 
human lust for wonders. Negative and constructive 
critics are one at the essential point that the gospel 
brings new confidence in the purpose and goal of 
human development. Immortality in the Christian 
sense does not mean that human life simply takes up 
its old interests. It means a new birth upward; 
a new advance, a new stage of human evolution ; a 
freer and more complete spiritual personality. 

2. From the point of view of evolution something 



236 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

like the resurrection of Jesus seems to be demanded. 
For, as has already been said, the course of evolution 
has not been simply towards the production of new 
species. It is rather towards the production of de- 
creasingly animal and consequently increasingly free 
spiritual individuaHty. It is at this point that the 
gospel appears to give significance to the process. 
In a sense almost startlingly true, Jesus is a second 
Adam. As the first man marked the rise of the new 
type of individual above the brute, so Jesus reveals the 
completion of the next step ahead in the process of the 
development of the spiritual individual. The a priori 
probability that there should develop some life 
through its identity with the End of the spiritual order 
made strong enough to conquer the conditions set by 
our physical limitations, is met by the message that 
such a life has appeared. The a priori probability 
meets the historical. 

It is from this union that the resurrection of Jesus 
as more than the creation of the faith of the dis- 
ciples becomes of real significance to the modem man. 
He will find difiiculties in some of the details of the 
record, but in the larger probability that such a per- 
sonality as that of Jesus, so obviously at the pinnacle 
of human moral development, should have had power 
to express itself as triumphantly over the ultimate 



THE DELIVERANCE FROM DEATH 237 

collapse of physical nature as over the temptations 
due to that physical nature, he will find a new help for 
his interpretation of his own deepest longings and an 
answer to that tragic question which we all face as to 
the meaning of our life. The gospel is a message 
of salvation not only in that it helps a man to be free 
from sin, but in that it interprets and even glorifies 
that all too seemingly relentless process in which we 
find ourselves involved. We do not believe in im- 
mortality simply because we believe in the story of the 
resurrection of Jesus, but with that story immortality 
gains a new value. We do not ground morality on 
immortality as such, but on the spiritual quality of life 
that can eventuate in such a triumph over anti- 
personal forces as we see in the case of Jesus. The 
resurrection is not something which must be believed 
in addition to that which we do believe, but with 
the weakening of the a priori objections against it, it 
may become what indeed the early church and in fact 
Christians of the centuries have claimed it to be -^ 
a means of bringing life and incorruption to light; 
a demonstration of the finality of the life of love. 

And unless I greatly mistake, the modem world is in 
serious danger of losing that estimate of the worth of 
the spiritual life which is given by the gospel with its 
insistence upon resurrection. With the assurance that 



238 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

the evidence of the resurrection of Jesus affords, a 
modern man sees new significance in the ever present 
moral struggle, gets new estimates of the worth of the 
life of love and sacrifice, and a larger and more com- 
pelling impulse to reproduce in his daily living that 
supreme life in the spirit which was lived by Jesus 
himself. He sees new meaning in the process in 
which he finds himself involved, new hopes for the 
race about which he had almost despaired. He 
realizes as he otherwise never could realize the mean- 
ing of God's presence in his world, and experiences 
as he otherwise never would experience the regenera- 
tion that comes to him who dares let God transform 
his being. He will have many questions — his very 
joy will prompt him to seek ever more completely 
the meaning of the new life he lives. But of one thing 
he will be assured : a reasonable gospel of deliverance 
from death — not from dying — to him as to every 
one who believes, whether he be modern or otherwise, 
will prove itself to be a message of inspiration and 
a moral dynamic. He will be less easily wearied in 
well-doing as he sees that his labor is not in vain in 
the Lord. 



PART III 
THE POWER OF THE GOSPEL 

CHAPTER VIII 

THE TEST OF LIFE 

In our discussion thus far, we have been concerned 
not so much with proving that the gospel is true in 
itself as that it is reasonable from the point of view 
of the modem man who recognizes the presence of 
God in his universe and trusts the impulses and 
potencies of his own spiritual life to seek foundation 
and reenforcement in God. In the great struggle 
between culture and faith, — a struggle that ought 
never to have arisen, but which ever since the days of 
Goethe has been waged with unceasing energy — 
two lines of strategy have been followed by the leaders 
of Christian thought. The one has been the direct 
defense of the Christian revelation in itself; the other 
has been the establishment of the reasonableness of 
the act and attitude of Christian faith. Both have 
had their victories, but in our present day the second 
line of defense is the more effective. Whatever 

239 



240 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

may be true of the metaphysical arguments for the 
existence of God and for the nature of the Trinity, 
Christian faith itself can be justified. Its champion 
can hopefully leave to the metaphysician the task 
of proving truths that lie beyond experience; he 
himself can show that it is reasonable to exercise 
faith in God. The two lines of argument will 
doubtless meet; they are by no means mutually 
exclusive. But nevertheless the modern man finds 
the religious and practical argument more in accord 
with his hard- won anti-metaphysical temper. 

If our task has been in any way fulfilled, it has 
appeared that the gospel of the New Testament 
when once seen in its elements and systematized by 
the modern equivalents of its original coordinating 
concepts, is consistent with those other facts and 
presuppositions which the modem man has come to 
accept. But it might appear that the gospel was 
left, as it were, in stable equilibrium. A further 
step must be taken. The gospel must not appear to 
be merely tenable; it must be seen to have power. 
"The man of science," says Huxley somewhere, 
"has learned to believe in justification, not by faith 
but by verification." Verification means experiment, 
the demonstration of practicability. If the gospel is 
to be a message of deliverance, it must deliver. 



THE TEST OF LIFE 24I 

I 

The evidence of practical accomplishment has al- 
ways been claimed for Christian teaching. As 
far back as the early apologists we find Aristides ap- 
pealing eloquently to the great philosopher- Emperor 
to acknowledge the Christians as taxpayers and 
loyal citizens. The unknown writer of the beautiful 
epistle to Diognetus declares that the Christians are 
to the world what the soul is to the body. Through- 
out the succeeding centuries the defender of Christian- 
ity has always found a great argument in the effect 
of Christian faith upon conduct, while the historian 
has recognized the influence of the church in the 
formation of European civilization. 

Of late however the test has somewhat changed its 
character. The importance of religion as an expres- 
sion of human nature, at least in certain of its stages of 
development, is admitted, but for various reasons 
religion, and particularly the Christian religion as 
expressed in the gospel, is judged not altogether 
practicable or adapted to our modem life. Let us 
look first at two general grounds for doubting the 
practicability of the gospel. 

I. It is argued that Christianity is an oriental 
religion, and accordingly is ill adapted to the West- 
em world. 



242 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

The general differences between oriental and occi- 
dental minds are well known, at least in so far as 
religions are concerned. The East is said to be more 
meditative and mystic, the West more practical. But 
the distinction certainly does not apply to the gospel, 
true as it is of the teaching of the great Indian litera- 
tures. The gospel may have originated in Palestine, 
but it is not oriental in character. Nor would any 
man who respects the definitions of his terms char- 
acterize the Hebrew thought as philosophic. It 
was intensely practical. The prophets never specu- 
lated; they counseled action. The Jews since 
Ezra^s time have never been out and out orientals; 
they have been cosmopolitan. So, too, in the teaching 
of Jesus there is hardly a sentence that can in any 
sense be said to be merely philosophical. Jesus is 
more a prophet and poet than one who reflects over 
the nature of things. The Fourth Gospel, it is true, 
moves out into a little different atmosphere, but it is 
largely a r3working of the teachings of Jesus by the 
evangelist, and even then it is far more akin to the 
philosophy of the West than it is to the philosophy of 
the East. The Logos doctrine was the bequest of the 
Greek. I do not doubt that at some points the orien- 
tal mind may discover significance in Jesus' words 
that might elude the less intuitive thinking of our 



THE TEST OF LIFE 243 

modem world. But I fail to see any serious limita- 
tions which are set upon the occidental interpretation 
of the gospel on the ground that it is an oriental 
product. Compare the gospel of Mark with the 
Bhagavad Gita and then, if you can, say they are 
of the same spirit. 

2. A far more serious objection to the gospel on 
the side of practical living is that it is excessively 
individualistic. 

It is a little difficult for me to appreciate the force 
of this objection. The individualism which the 
gospel inculcates is farthest possible from that 
insulated individualism set forth in certain phases 
of Christian theology and particularly in oriental 
philosophies. According to these latter teachings, 
perfection is to be reached by the complete with- 
drawal of men from social life, by defrauding all the 
social impulses. The individualism of the gospel, 
paradoxical as it may seem, is social. A man is to 
reach his fullest self-expression in the altruistic life 
of love. That life alone can be reenforced by the 
Holy Spirit. Salvation, in the terms of the New 
Testament, consists in possessing the quality of life 
which constitutes a man's being a member of the 
kingdom of God; and the kingdom of God, no 
matter how eschatological it may have been 



244 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

regarded by the Jews and the early Christians, was 
a social order. 

The claim that the gospel induces excessive in- 
dividualism is true only of that perverted applica- 
tion of its message which would insist that a man 
reaches his salvation in other wa,ys than those set 
by the gospel itself. No man can fail to honor those 
noble misrepresentations of Christian self-sacrifice 
which led men and women to abandon family, and 
city, and coimtry, and seek peace with their God as 
hermits. He will not altogether decry that search 
for an individualistic salvation that seeks heaven 
with its blessings rather than hell with its pains. 
For even thus men have been led to a service to 
society in almsgiving and homely helpfulness. 
The evidence, however, of the unnaturalness of the 
Christianity which such conduct involves is to be 
seen in the fact that such men and women so fre- 
quently slip over the border line into eccentricity, 
or spiritual pride and unfraternal condescension. 
Christianity in so far as it has attempted to repro- 
duce the real spirit of the gospel has made toward 
democracy. This in itself is an evidence that the 
individualism which it inculcates has its social ele- 
ment. The more other-worldly the Puritan was, 
the more did he insist on town meetings. History 



THE TEST OF LIFE 245 

is punctuated by those self-sacrificing groups of 
men who have attempted to live in some form a 
communistic life in accordance with what seemed to 
them to be the real principles of the individual's 
life in the spirit. 

And, after all, is not the gospel, just because it 
does magnify a true sort of individualism, much 
closer to the nature of things than if it sought to 
subordinate the individual to society? Which is 
truer to fact — that the individual exists for the 
benefit of society or that society is a part of that 
situation in which the individual may reach his 
most completely personal self-expression? To my 
mind there can be only one answer to such ques- 
tion. The entire process of history seems to be the 
development of the free personality as over against 
the production of a new society. Religion may be 
described as the voluntary anticipation of the next 
stage of this process whose goal is the perfected 
spiritual individual, through personal union with God. 

But the gospel of freedom is not to be taken too 
literally. If men are not twins because they are 
brothers, so in the larger fraternity of the spirit, 
they are not free from limitations set by the neces- 
sity of living in social groups. Society in the best 
sense of the word is a means to freedom. One 



246 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

cannot read the works of Tolstoi without feeling that 
in his reaction against the conception of govern- 
ment to which he as a Russian is accustomed, he 
has overlooked the social element in the free per- 
sonality. Cooperation among individuals is in- 
volved in a personal environment. The anti- 
governmental teachings of Tolstoi, serviceable as 
they are as an antidote to mere conventionality, can 
never become anything more than a sort of season- 
ing in our social life. A truer conception of the 
gospel as setting forth the way to the freedom of a 
social individualism, will regard it as the real leaven 
of society. 

II 

If, however, apart from over-statement we consider 
the practicability of the gospel as a message of a free 
spiritual life in a changing social order like ours, 
we certainly face a most serious matter. For any 
teaching that lies beyond the power of realization 
will be powerless in the same proportion as men 
realize its impracticability. 

There confronts us at the very outset the funda- 
mental question as to whether the conceptions upon 
which the ethics of the gospel rest are really final. 
Is the life of love and sacrifice the noblest sort of 
life? Such a question will doubtless seem absurd 



THE TEST OF LIFE 247 

to those who have accepted the Christian ideal as 
a social convention. Though no one has ever 
embodied it fully, yet the consensus of opinion in 
Christian civilizations has been that the ideal of love 
and service, even at the expense of sacrifice, is really 
that toward which humanity should strive. On this 
we base our final apologetic: though Jesus — and 
this seems to me the Ultima Thule of improbability, 
— were to be shown never to have existed, the values 
which the gospel has brought into life would be 
eternal. 

But we are no more content with such a minimum 
of defense than with mere conventionally rhetorical 
praise. If the gospel is to remain a power in so- 
ciety it involves something pretty close to a revolu- 
tion in many of the forms of our life. It is impera- 
tive that those who claim allegiance to it should 
pause long enough to face the fundamental ques- 
tions which their profession of loyalty to Jesus in- 
volves. 

I. There are those who insist that the gospel as 
an ethical ideal is imperfect because of its use of 
reward and punishment. 

There is nothing to which the academic ethicist 
is so opposed as to rewards and punishments. And 
his opposition is justified in the same proportion as 



248 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

those terms are seen to stand for arbitrary assign- 
ments of fate in the way of bribes or threats. To 
urge a man to be good in order that he may go to 
heaven and not go to hell is a good deal like telling 
your boy that if he will be honest you will give him 
fifty cents. Virtue like honesty may be the best 
policy, but a man who is virtuous through policy is 
likely to be vicious when he judges vice the best 
policy. Further, it cannot be denied that in certain 
stages of civilization Christian teachers have so used 
this appeal as to shock the moral sense of the more 
intelligent members of the community. 

It does not seem to me, however, that it is diffi- 
cult to reply to such an objection. It is due to a 
misunderstanding of the gospel and to a literalizing 
of figures of speech. Substitute "genetic outcomes" 
for "rewards and punishment" and most of the 
difficulty vanishes. It is only the legalistic con- 
ception of ethics which gives room for the distortion 
of gospel teaching to which objection can be raised. 
And the gospel knows nothing of statutes. It knows 
only personalities. Its purpose is to get men saved, 
to possess a quality of life, not external goods, whether 
in terms of prosperity or heaven. It teaches dis- 
tinctly that evil states bring suffering and that 
righteous states bring joy and peace. But neither 



THE TEST OF LIFE 249 

outcome is external to the personality. Each is in- 
volved genetically as an outcome of states of ac- 
tivity. One would not say that a physician was 
dealing with rewards and punishment when he points 
out that one course of action involved disease and 
so suffering, or that another course of action involved 
health and so physical comfort. Jesus was the Great 
Physician. The gospel is his prescription. 

2. A more fundamental objection, however, lies 
in that philosophy to which Nietzsche has given 
vogue, but which is really far older than he. Ac- 
cording to Nietzsche the fundamental principle of life 
is the "will to power." That is the precise oppo- 
site of love. According to him, there are two sorts 
of morality, that of the master and that of the slave. 
Christian morality belongs to the second. It puts 
a premium on weakness, and through its care for 
the weaker tends to restrain the fundamental im- 
pulse of life to master environment, both personal 
and impersonal, and must therefore lead ultimately 
to the deterioration of the race. Above all moral 
conceptions which are the outgrowth of passing 
social needs, and are given authority by religion, 
there is the great impulse which, beyond all stand- 
ards of good and evil, the masters of the race 
must embody. 



250 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

It is not difficult to see that, despite its com- 
mendable emphasis on the supreme worth of per- 
sonality, such a conception of ethics is fundamen- 
tally hostile to the one elemental presupposition of 
the gospel that the universe is filled with love. Even 
more particularly is it hostile to the conceptions 
set forth in the teaching and death of Jesus. It 
cannot be denied that it is based on something which 
is true. One great impulse in life is to master en- 
vironment, and morality and religion itself lie im- 
plicit in this impulse. More than that, even with 
all his exaggeration, Nietzsche effectively empha- 
sizes the supremacy of the free spirit. But the 
whole matter centers over the question as to whether 
this impulse toward mastery is the only impulse in 
humanity. Nietzsche here is not unlike Rousseau. 
He finds his standards in the conditions of savagery 
or low civilization. To him the Germans of Taci- 
tus were superior to the Germans of to-day. That 
is to say, he would undo the entire work of civiliza- 
tion as tending to the production of the Appollonian 
or slave morality. 

Now it is quite impossible to hold that civilization 
is degeneration. Granting that "will to power" 
is a fundamental attribute of life, it seems reductio 
ad absurdum to hold that the moment that power 



THE TEST OF LIFE 251 

begins to express itself in the conquest of nature, 
social cooperation to conquer those things which 
hold the savage in subjection is weakness. But 
such cooperation leads inevitably to ethical codes. 
For over what is power to be exercised? Must it 
be simply the power of the strong man over other 
men? May not the highest type of power be ex- 
pressed in that social cooperation which lies at the 
basis of civilization and to which Christianity has 
contributed? We can readily grant that there have 
been periods in history and that there have been 
individuals who have so mistaken the call to sacri- 
fice as to make sacrifice an end to itself. But the 
real gospel is the farthest possible from asceticism, 
however many Christians may have been ascetics. 
Christianity has itself a call to power ; it has its vic- 
tories, Only they are the victories not of the 
physical man but of the spiritual. It complements 
the impulse to power through conquest by the im- 
pulse to power toward harmonization with already 
existing personal forces. 

In such a contrast between the teaching of Jesus 
and the teaching of Nietzsche we are confronting the 
fundamental antithesis that lies in the world of values. 
Self-expression and self -development are undoubted 
goods, and self-development can come only by con- 



252 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

quest, but the conquest which Christianity insists 
upon is the conquest over things which are un- 
spiritual and impersonal ; those from which civiliza- 
tion constantly tends to free men. It would insist 
that the power which must come to human life shall 
be the power which comes through cooperation with 
the higher forms of life. Primitive Germans con- 
quered nature by killing wild animals; civilized 
Germans conquer nature by breeding cattle. Primi- 
tive man ruled over his fellows by terrorizing them 
into physical subjection; in the Christian commu- 
nity the individual is brought into subjection through 
his own cooperation with the social will. The gos- 
pel recognizes and rationalizes this principle by 
insisting that love is a form of social cooperation 
which involves sacrifice, not in the interest of self- 
repression, but in the interest of self-development 
along more potent, more personal, because less 
animalistic, lines. And it bases its imperative 
upon its belief in the love of that God whose spiritual 
life conditions all spiritual living. The two con- 
ceptions of power placed over against each other 
mean simply this : reversion to " civilized " savagery 
or advance to fraternity. 

3. But even on the part of those who are not 
ready to fiiid in unloving force something which is 



THE TEST OF LEFE 253 

superior to good and evil, there is the belief that 
justice is superior to brotherhood. Here again the 
question at issue is the very nature of the gospel 
itself. For the gospel has little to say about jus- 
tice and very much to say about brotherliness. 

The appeal to justice is an exceedingly powerful 
motive. But it is an appeal that needs to be ana- 
lyzed. In reality there are two attitudes toward 
justice, that of getting and that of giving. The 
impulse to get justice is not evangelical; the im- 
pulse to give justice is. The great command that 
Jesus lays upon his followers is not to have their 
wrongs righted but to seek to right the wrongs of 
others. To that end they must be ready to sacri- 
fice, as he sacrificed. 

It is easy enough to see that this is not attractive 
doctrine, and that it cuts across some of the in- 
herited elemental passions of life. Moreover, the 
average Christian man is sometimes apt to think 
that when he seeks his own selfish will he is really 
doing the will of God. But despite the difficulties 
of realizing its ideal, the emphasis laid by the gospel 
upon the giving of justice, rather than upon the 
getting of justice, is consonant with life as we know 
it. Revolutions have seldom if ever won more 
rights than the more thoughtful among the privi- 



254 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

leged persons of the time would have been ready to 
grant. How much farther did the French revolu- 
tion proceed in permanent accomplishments beyond 
the rights which were freely surrendered on August 
4, 1789? 

Even if this generalization be open to question, it 
can hardly be denied that to grant a privilege freely 
in the interest of giving another justice is certainly 
preferable to a recourse to revolution. But to give 
justice is brotherhood, and to recognize the impera- 
tiveness of such an act is to testify to the worth of 
the gospel's estimate of sacrifice. Brotherhood is 
not weakness; it is simply difficult. Yet in the 
same proportion as men come under the ideals of 
the gospel does it become operative. Nor does there 
seem to be any social condition quite beyond its 
power. Individuals, it is true, may cling to privi- 
lege and force on a struggle to get rights. It is true 
also that time is requisite for fraternal ideals really 
to become operative through becoming socialized. 
But gradually in one field after another the practical 
power of the ideals of the gospel has exhibited itself. 
Slavery was certainly a serious and complicated 
problem, yet slavery in the Roman Empire was 
abolished in the same proportion as Christianity 
got control of the slave-holding classes. It is 



THE TEST OF LIFE 255 

worth while to remember this whenever tempted to 
think despairingly of the problems set by our 
present social order. 

It may be objected that to get justice for others is 
altruistic ; that the class struggle now in evidence is 
not a struggle on the part of the leaders for their own 
rights, but is a struggle on their part for the rights 
of others. And this is true, but it is not contrary 
to the gospel. To get justice for others by com- 
pelling the over-privileged to give it to them may 
be the very quintessence of love, and in so far the 
motives of champions of the so-called unprivileged 
masses are of a sort with that which the gospel de- 
clares to be the very quality of God. The sad 
thing about the situation is that such champions 
should be necessary. But that is only to lament 
the quality of human nature itself. The striking 
thing is that at all periods in the development of 
Western civilization there have been men and women 
who have thus championed the weak at the cost of 
genuine self-sacrifice. They have not always allied 
themselves with Christian churches. Ofttimes they 
have found in the Christian church the very persons 
whom they had to force to give justice. But such 
facts do not affect the fundamental position that, in 
thus seeking to get rights for others by forcing men 



256 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

to give justice when they were unwilling to be fra- 
ternal, such reformers have been embodying the 
spirit of Jesus himself, and their success is a further 
argument of the work of the practicability of the 
gospel message. It is the imprimatur of history 
upon the social teaching of the Good Neighbor on 
Calvary. 

4. Again, there is the ordinary man — and with 
him now and then the theologian — who believes 
that the Sermon on the Mount is unworkable. 

It is no answer to say that the Sermon on the 
Mount is not the gospel, for it contains the ideals 
which the gospel presupposes as the final ideals of 
the spiritual life it undertakes to beget. If the ideals 
Jesus taught are altogether beyond realization; 
if an honest attempt to put them into our social life 
must result inevitably, and always as in his own 
case, in overwhelming defeat and sorrow; then it 
may as well be admitted that they, and the gospel 
that heralds them as the realization of the final will 
of God, are unfitted to humanity. No religious 
message can deserve acceptance that promises only 
an endless suffering bom of ideals perpetually 
maladjusted to social evolution. 

Unless I utterly mistake, it is at this point that 
the final test of the gospel has been made at different 



THE TEST OF LIFE 257 

stages of the history of civilization and it will be at 
this point that the final verdict will be given in our 
day. The real issues which the gospel faces lie 
among the plain people. No esoteric religion has 
ever been, or will ever be, of any real significance 
except in the way of tyranny or oppression. Cer- 
tainly the gospel could never remain the gospel 
if it once became the exclusive property of an 
aristocracy. Just as certainly is it true that the 
rank and file of men are testing the gospel to-day 
on the basis of its actual efficiency to bring the 
ideals of Jesus into social life. True, many church 
members of the older sort fail to appreciate this 
fact. They still think that precision in doctrinal 
statement is the vital matter, and in too many cases 
they are unwilling to take as the sufficient test of 
loyalty to the gospel a determination to produce 
among individuals and in society the quality of life 
of Jesus. They want a confession of belief about 
Jesus as well as a life full of confidence in Jesus. 
But a knowledge of the situation as it exists outside 
of the existing circles of ultra-ecclesiasticism :an 
lead to only one conclusion ; namely, the rank and 
file of men have ceased to be interested in the ques- 
tions of trinitarianism, the substitutionary atone- 
ment, decrees, foreordination, or even the infalli- 



258 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

bility of the Scriptures. Such matters, it is true, 
are still discussed in church circles and theological 
seminaries, and by some clergymen, but the flood 
of interest has passed these questions and looks 
to the far more vital issue which, without the plain 
man's knowing it, is that raised by Nietzsche. 
The maxims of our social life in so far as they are 
anything more than the luxury of idle moments are 
maxims dealing with success. The ideal man of 
to-day is first of all the man who amasses great 
power by amassing great wealth; in the second 
place he is the man who amasses power in politics; 
in the third place he is the man who amasses honor 
in some profession or non-commercial pursuit. 
Theoretically the champions of these classes of 
men justify their ideals in terms of social service. 
Practically any service that costs much bother or 
sacrifice is relegated to those who are leading, so to 
speak, professional vicarious lives supported by men 
who are pursuing the ''will to power." 

It must be admitted that our social order as it 
no ' stands is not conducive to checking this pur- 
suit of success as the final good. The man who 
deliberately chooses the vicarious life will find 
plenty of opportunities to emulate the martyrs even 
though he may not have the distinction of being 



THE TEST OF LIFE 259 

burned alive. The gospel is submitting to the 
same general test that its followers endure. If it 
cannot evoke from its followers the cooperative 
impulse which Jesus calls love; if it cannot stimu- 
late men to choose the higher sets of values rather 
than the material; in a word, if it cannot be indi- 
vidually and socially redemptive, it will fail miser- 
ably. 

I cannot see how any fair-minded observer of the 
history of Western civilization, and particularly the 
student of democracy, can fail to see that in a broad 
way the gospel is constantly and successfully pioneer- 
ing in this precise direction. We are always in 
danger of judging any great social movement by 
individuals whom we happen to know. In this 
fashion some of us who have been unfortunate 
enough to be thrown into company with hypocriti- 
cal Christians come to distrust the power of the 
gospel in our present social order, while others of 
us, who have been more fortunate in our com- 
panions, are more optimistic in our hopes. But 
experiences of either sort are, after all, misleading 
when treated as universal. We must take a broad 
outlook. The questions which we must answer are : 
In the midst of this struggle for success do we find a 
rising sense of the rights' of the less favored ? Is 



26o THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

our interest in the weaker growing more brotherly 
or are we more tempted to treat them as delin- 
quent or defective pawns in the social struggle? 
Is the general tone of our social morality rising as 
regards the care of children, the treatment of women 
in industry, the insistence on humanitarian care 
for employees ? Is there growing up a larger readi- 
ness to consent to changes in some of the structural 
relations of economic life, for the purpose of demo- 
cratizing privilege? Such questions as these are 
not to be answered by impressions drawn from 
this or that man, but by the study of statistics, of 
legislation, of commercial ideals, of philanthropy, of 
education. And such a study, though it be as dis- 
criminating as facts demand, will show that the 
fundamental principles of the gospel in terms of 
ethical life are increasingly influential. 

It is no valid objection to such a hopeful view to 
say that all this is in the region of ethics, not that of 
religion. If the gospel is to be condemned for its 
failure in these fields, it certainly is only fair play 
to credit it with such successes as it has there achieved. 
And as a matter of fact the ethics of the gospel is its 
religion coming to self-realization in social relations. 
The men and women who are most interested in 
this social uplift are those who at some point or 



THE TEST OF LIFE 261 

Other have been touched by the dynamics of the 
gospel itself. They may be far apart from the 
churches, but the churches and the gospel are not 
identical. More than that, the churches them- 
selves are growing more evangelical. The power of 
the vicarious life is greater to-day than ever before. 
Jesus may be less thought of as the second person 
of the Trinity suffering upon the cross to make 
feudal satisfaction to a feudal God, but he is none 
the less increasingly thought of as the "strong son 
of God, immortal love," who took upon himself 
our infirmities, shared the bitterness of our indus- 
trial order, endured the buffetings of sinful men, 
paid love's penalty to religious bigotry, and, through 
the faith which he evokes, draws men to his own 
ideal of vicarious life as that of God Himself. 

It is only corroboration of this view when we see 
the gospel powerful in individual lives. What tri- 
umphs it has won over debased souls ! Drunkards 
and liars, prostitutes and thieves, yes, even hypo- 
critical sinners of so-called respectable classes, who 
would otherwise be found among the miserable 
outcasts denied admission to the New Jerusalem, 
have been transformed by its power and made 
fellow-heirs with the saints of all the ages! We 
sometimes say that the age of great religious 



262 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

revivals is past, but the facts give the lie to the as- 
sertion. The past few years have seen not only 
innumerable revivals of the type men said were no 
longer possible, but they have seen also an ex- 
traordinary response the world over on the part of 
individual men and women to the appeal of Jesus 
for that sort of life which he himself lived. Evan- 
gelism itself is being filled with the social spirit. 
If we admit, as I believe we must^ that as yet the 
life of Jesus cannot be lived in our social order 
without self-sacrifice, we must also admit that 
the socialization of the gospel is proceeding, and 
that the plain man finds it easier to-day to embody 
the principles of Jesus than he did ten years ago. 
This I admit is a statement that must bear the 
test of facts. I make it not hastily, but in view of 
what seems to me to be the indubitable evidence 
of the new appropriation of the gospel by the men 
of to-day. Give the tendencies everywhere discover- 
able another decade of development, and its truth 
will be less open to question. 

5. There is also the rising school of radicals who 
believe that the gospel's ideals were not intended 
for the historically developing social order, but 
were intended to serve ad interim during the bitter 
period when the followers of Christ awaited his re- 



THE TEST OF LIFE 263 

turn to establish his new kingdom. Such an opin- 
ion is based upon the assumptions that the catas- 
trophe which was to inaugurate the kingdom was 
an essential element in the thought of Jesus as well 
as of his disciples, and that his teachings were in- 
tended to set forth the way in which the expectant 
Christian should bear the buffetings of an outra- 
geous age. Any attempt, therefore, to develop such 
ad interim ethics into a permanent ideal is judged 
possible only by reading back into the New Testa- 
ment conceptions of which Jesus and his apostles 
were altogether innocent. 

The seriousness of such a position as this is ob- 
vious. If Jesus and his apostles were not con- 
cerned with fundamental questions of humanity, 
but only with a modus vivendi pending the speedy 
coming of the kingdom from heaven, then it is 
impossible to see how their words can be of any 
lasting significance. They pass from the company 
of the great teachers of all time into that of vision- 
aries whose visions were false. 

Such a position will seem to the average man 
highly improbable, and indeed it may be to some 
extent avoided by holding that the fundamental 
thought of Jesus as to the fatherliness of God still 
holds good, notwithstanding his specific ideals of 



264 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

society. But such a defense is as questionable as 
the reduction of Jesus to an ecstatic enthusiast. A 
Jesus that lacked moral uniqueness, who was never 
raised from the dead, who taught only ad interim 
ethics and was essentially an ecstatic, is not likely 
to be of vital significance to the modem world, even 
though he may have taught the fatherliness of God. 
Yet the position has none the less sufficient jus- 
tification to deserve attention. There can be little 
doubt that the belief in the speedy return of Jesus 
to establish his kingdom did to some extent affect 
the social teaching of Paul. He believed that the 
conditions under which the church existed were 
temporary. He did not consciously plan for distant 
posterity because he did not believe there was to be 
any distant posterity. The age was to be suddenly 
closed, and a new age was to be introduced. Between 
the two there was no genetic relation outside the 
community of the saved, that is, the church. But, 
as we have already endeavored to show, such views 
in the case of Paul are practically lacking in the 
teaching of Jesus. Such traces of them as remain 
in the oldest stratum of the gospel are incidental, 
and to make them the controlling factors from which 
to estimate the social ideals of Jesus is utterly to dis- 
tort the perspective of the gospel. The same is in 



THE TEST OF LIFE 265 

large measure true of Paul. Ad interim ethics is 
undoubtedly present in the apostle's letters to the 
Corinthians; but it is not the gospel and he never 
regarded it as the gospel. It was simply directions 
as to how men who believed in the gospel should 
live. The expectation of the speedy coming of Christ 
was to be disappointed, at least in any such sense as 
would satisfy the content of the expectation ; but the 
new life of the spirit which was induced by faith in 
Jesus as Christ was not subject to any ad interim 
regulations. That new life was the eternal life. 

Any fair interpretation of the gospel must not 
over-emphasize the prominence of the catastrophic 
element in the early Christian thought. Sooner or 
later, as the novelty of the catastrophic idea passes, 
we shall see that in the ideals of individual and 
social life contained in the gospel we have what 
is permanent. Both Paul and Jesus, but particularly 
the latter, looked across the great chasm which was 
to separate the one age from the other and centered 
attention upon the quality of life which, beginning 
in the present age, would reach fullest element in the 
coming age. Such ideals may be criticised as too 
high for the social order as we know it, but they 
cannot fairly be criticised as not intended for the 
present age. The gospel was for real men and 



266 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

women living in an evil age. The universal feeling 
of the race has not been altogether wrong in its 
perception of the dominating influence of Jesus. 
Two millennia of experience cannot be thrust 
aside by an academic overestimate of certain ele- 
ments in the life of the early Christians. 

6. Finally there is the fundamental opposition 
of the non-religious modem man to the spiritual 
order. 

We have in our discussion, it will be recalled, 
restricted the term "modern man" to those who 
have religious interests, and with whom therefore 
the gospel has common ground. But such a clas- 
sification, while justifiable, needs to be supplemented 
by the recognition of the influence of modem men 
of a different type. It is one of the paradoxical char- 
acteristics of history that the forces of illumination 
and of culture often depreciate not merely Chris- 
tianity as a body of formulated doctrines, but that 
fundamental faith in the supremacy of the spirit 
which Christianity presupposes. This conflict be- 
tween the two orders of life, the order of physical 
nature and the order of the spirit, was never more 
sharply waged than to-day. 

The representatives of naturalism fall roughly 
into two classes: those who are dominated by a 



THE TEST OF LIFE 267 

materialistic interpretation of nature and those 
whose devotion to ideahstic relations is aesthetic. 

If a plebiscite of men of science were undertaken, 
it would probably show a majority in favor of non- 
mechanical interpretation of the universe. Doubt- 
less this majority would be not committed to evan- 
gelical Christianity as such, although on this point 
anything like trustworthy statistics are unobtain- 
able. But in the world of science minorities are 
often a potent leaven, and their influence extends 
beyond the limits of statistics. The influence of 
a man like Haeckel is far wider than among the men 
of science who accept his findings, for it has extended 
out into the great public and is exhibited throughout 
the world in the establishment of clubs. The 
members of these clubs believe themselves thor- 
oughly modem and among them are many who 
discount all religion, and Christianity in particular. 
Similar is the case of many men who, although of 
no particular intellectual attainment, have been 
caught in the general spirit of revolt against the 
past and pride themselves on a general negative 
attitude as regarding religion. Men and women 
of such temper who have also become Marxian 
socialists are very apt to be bitter in their assaults 
upon Christianity. 



268 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

Again, there is the other class of modem men 
whose interest is particularly in the more aesthetic 
aspects of culture. They are, of course, in sym- 
pathy with the general scientific position, but they 
are particularly concerned with matters of litera- 
ture and art. To a considerable degree they are the 
modem representatives of the men of the Illumina- 
tion and the Renaissance. It would be difficult to 
discover how far such polite interest in the world is 
atheistic, but so far as it is expressed in poetry and 
in essays it certainly could not be characterized as 
evangelical. Generally speaking, it is indifferent 
rather than positive. If its representatives would 
so far yield to the theological pressure as to become 
interested in the formulation and justification of 
religious belief, very possibly some of them might 
be brought to sympathy with Christianity. Their 
influence, however, like those of the more pro- 
nouncedly scientific propagandists of non-religion, 
is steadily being felt and is certain to be extended 
still farther unless it is met by an intellectually 
satisfactory apologetic. In so far as the influence 
of these two types of modem men is unopposed by 
an evangelicalism that agrees with them in accept- 
ing the findings of modem science, it will injuri- 
ously affect the modem men of the more religious 



THE TEST OF LIFE 269 

type; for it represents a current in life which must 
be opposed if it is not to be supreme. 

The things which are not seen, humanity believes, 
are eternal, but they need constant vindication. 
We need to show to modem men of this anti-reli- 
gious type that the Christian thinker does not hesitate 
to accept the challenge of those who deny the validity 
and finality of the spiritual order. For it is this 
denial, whether positive or involved in religious in- 
difiFerence, that threatens our modern world. The 
enormous development of material resources; the 
mad search for pleasure; the growing and in some 
cases intentional paganism of a society that once 
called itself Christian, — all are among the startling 
phenomena of our day. And yet idealism has not 
been crushed out. Again and again it has risen from 
its tomb just as its executors were celebrating its 
death. So it is to-day. The very pressure of the 
materialistic forces of civilization has served to 
bring to the forefront the new idealism. And this 
new idealism is an ally of the gospel, even though in 
many cases it hesitates to affirm some of the elements, 
particularly the historical, of the gospel which we 
have formulated. It could not be otherwise, for it 
is steadily developing and recognizing that attitude 
of faith which the gospel presupposes. In the case 



270 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

of a man like Eucken this alliance is explicit. But 
whether explicit or not every believer in evangelical- 
ism, as contradistinguished from an ecclesiastical 
orthodoxy, should welcome its assistance and be 
ready to show that what it sets forth in terms of an 
interpretation of the universe, Christianity also ex- 
hibits in the specific experiences of Jesus and the 
men of Christian faith. 

These various forces which assault the reasonable- 
ness and practicability of the gospel are, unfortu- 
nately, too often ignored or minimized by the defenders 
of evangelical faith. Such a procedure is greatly to 
be deplored. Even though it may be true that men 
are seldom argued into religion they are certainly 
often argued out of it. To say that such anti-reli- 
gious feeling is the expression of moral difficulties, or, 
as it is sometimes put by earnest religious men, that 
doubt implies sin, is to deepen the chasm between 
the church and those modern men who are already 
anti-religious, and to make more difficult the task of 
the religious modern man who wishes to maintain 
loyalty both to the modern world and to the gospel. 
It is true that it is not necessary for men to go through 
the agony of religious doubt in order to come into the 
health of religious faith, but to assert that persons 
passing through the process of theological reconstruc- 



TEST OF LITE 271 

tion are sinful is a fatal mistake. A rational apolo- 
getic at this point is as much needed to-day as it was 
at the time of Justin Martyr or Paley. The fact that 
the battleground and weapons have changed should 
not lead us to minimize the fact that the battle is still 
on, and that it has passed from the outposts to the 
very fortress of religion itself. As to the final out- 
come we can have no doubt, but it is the part of wis- 
dom to see that the battle is not prolonged and that 
the forces of the enemy are not increased by the defec- 
tion of overdisciplined or wrongly trained defenders. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE NEW LIFE IN CHRIST 

To meet objections to the practicability of the gos- 
pel is, however, to leave the matter only negatively 
considered. At the best we have thus showed only 
that in the past it has proved efficient. The real 
question is whether it contains within itself an au- 
thoritative appeal which can so transform men of 
to-day as to do for them what it did for their less 
scientific predecessors who lived in less complicated 
social conditions. 

But the word authoritative does not mean exter- 
nal compulsion. Our discussion thus far \^dll have 
been utterly misunderstood if the impression should 
have been made that the gospel is of the nature of 
dogma. Jesus does not need any vote of ecclesias- 
tical majorities to establish his truthfulness. To 
attempt to apply the gospel in our present age is 
not simply to bring over from the past that which 
must be believed under penalty ; it is rather to at- 
tempt to give control to the impulses of the spirit- 
ual life by the use of facts that have both historical 

272 



THE NEW LIFE IN CHRIST 273 

and religious significance, and also by the use of 
principles and ideals which the experience of the 
Christian community have shown to be reason- 
able and morally effective. The authority of the 
gospel lies not in the presuppositions with which 
it is approached, but in its capacity to evoke the 
response of the spiritual life. It has the energy 
of the ideal and not the command of the decree. 



I. What is that salvation which the gospel of the 
New Testament asserts can be brought to individ- 
uals ? We have defined it negatively as deliverance, 
in New Testament terms, from Satan, sin, and death, 
and in the modern equivalent as deliverance from 
physical necessity, from the backward pull of the 
vestiges of past stages of development surviving in 
the individual and society, and from the collapse of 
the process of physical development in death. But 
we have seen also that the gospel promises more than 
mere rescue. Rescue is only the converse of that 
positive deliverance which is in terms of transformed 
and triumphant personality, raised by fellowship 
with God into superiority to the impersonal world of 
nature and the less personal forces that lead to sin. 
How distinct this is in the teaching of Jesus must be 



274 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

clear to every one who attentively studies the oldest 
strata of the gospel records. The later editors of 
these strata may have been dominated to a higher 
degree than Jesus by a conception of a catastrophic 
deliverance, but they were not content to describe 
even this great event of the future as merely a rescue. 
Jesus did more than throw out a life line ; he re- 
leases a life force in every soul that trusts him. The 
teachings of Jesus as revealed by sympathetic criti- 
cism are fundamentally in terms of life. There is not 
a suggestion of self-repression in his words. His 
teaching as to sacrifice is a teaching of the subordina- 
tion of a secondary, impersonal, to a primary, personal 
good. Physical life may well be lost to gain a 
spiritual life like that of God. 

It can hardly be necessary to point out that this 
spiritual life, to the full attainment of which the gospel 
points the way, does not necessarily involve any pecul- 
iar psychology, such as sometimes masks itself be- 
hind the word spirit. Nor is it an abstraction gained 
by eliminating concrete qualities. It is rather a 
transformed life itself, the equivalent in our modern 
thought of the eternal life of which Jesus so frequently 
spoke. For eternal life with Jesus is neither a new 
vital quantum nor yet a mere continuation of the 
life one lives before death. The history of the term 



THE NEW LIFE IN CHRIST 275 

cannot be shaped up from a philological analysis of a 
Greek word. It is one of the aspects of a socialized 
concept, the already familiar messianic hope. The 
gospel presupposes those two ages which formed so 
essential an element in the messianic program ; *' this 
age" full of misery and oppression of the righteous, 
and " the Age to come" when the kingdom was to be 
established, the will of God was to be perfectly done, 
and joy was to be the eternal possession of the Chris- 
tian. Everlastingness is involved in this life because 
the Age is never to end, but it is only one of its ele- 
ments. When Jesus and the apostles looked forward 
to the Age-life they looked forward not to a primitive 
conception of the re^mergence of the interests of the 
physical life, but, as we can now see, to a higher type 
of life, in which there was to be not only a continua- 
tion of that evolution of individuality we already can 
trace, but a blessed improvement upon everything 
physical. The conflict between the natural and 
spiritual orders — that is what the two ages of 
Christian messianism pictured ; the joyous triumph 
of the spiritual life in the spiritual order — that is 
the blessedness of the kingdom of God. 

To attain to this spiritual life is to be saved. Its 
elements, or at least its potencies, are already resident 
in the human personality, but need toj be made 



276 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

supreme in self-realization and self-expression. This 
can be possible only as a man is volitionally at one 
with an environing God from whom he [has been 
separated by sin. Such a radical change, however, 
is possible only as one chooses to make paramount the 
values of the spiritual life, or, as Jesus would say, 
repents and seeks the eternal life of the kingdom of 
God. The full establishment in one's living of such 
a perspective of values in itself constitutes salvation, 
for it is to have one's entire personal existence con- 
trolled by the timeless ideal of love like that of the 
eternal God. A personality controlled by the im- 
pulses of the physical life, by devotion to things 
which are temporal, like property or the physical life 
itself, in the very nature of the case is not saved. It 
is degenerating and reverting to impersonal living. 
As Jesus himself taught, in seeking to save that 
which is temporal and physical men neglect and lose 
that which is spiritual and eternal. It is a grievous 
mistake which some of our moral teachers are making 
when they push the enjoyment of eternal life over 
beyond death. From the point of view of the gospel 
man will never be more immortal than he is now. 
He is already either living the life of the flesh or the 
life of the spirit. He is already **dead" or "risen." 
That is the very keynote of the teaching of Jesus. 



THE NEW LIFE IN CHRIST 277 

In his devotion to those timeless values he sacrificed 
everything that was temporary — family, occupation, 
comfort, life itself. In him and in his followers the 
eternally personal elements triumphed even in a 
world of time over impersonal and sinful forces. 

Inexplicable as some of the elements of this salva- 
tion through the victory of the timeless spiritual Hfe 
are, we still can see that it is true to the fundamental 
principle of life itself. For it demands not only ex- 
ternal conduct, but an actual adjustment of one's 
personality to the spiritual world of God. Regenera- 
tion is no mere technical term. Morality is sancti- 
fied into blessedness by the more complete personaH- 
zation of the man who chooses to trust and rely 
upon God, the Absolute Reason, who is also Love. 

We have not sufiiciently recognized the supreme 
place of this completer personalization of humanity 
in the teaching of Jesus, for we do not really under- 
stand his message until we see that the deliverance 
which he promises is accomplished by such a trans- 
formation of life from the tyranny of change to the 
freedom of eternal values. The tyranny of natural 
forces, it is true, can still be exerted over the imper- 
sonal elements in our being. God can crush us in 
earthquakes and avalanches, but in so doing he is 
not working within the sphere of spirit. He treats 



278 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

US personally only as He loves and saves us. The 
eternal life which Jesus would have men attain is 
that which Plato dimly pictured in his Ideas, and 
poets have sung in their noblest visions of the true 
worth of the human spirit. Mankind is saved from 
natural forces both without and within itself by a 
divine fellowship that raises the human soul above 
them and accustoms its activities to the primacy of 
such immaterial eternal goods as faith and justice 
and love. 

2. The teaching of Paul is the same. Our theol- 
ogies have preferred to shape themselves along the 
interpretative, forensic thought of the apostle, but 
in the light of the historical approach to his gospel 
we are coming to see that what Paul was most inter- 
ested in was personality that had reached self-expres- 
sion in the new spiritual order revealed in Jesus. 
Alongside of his striking exposition of the messianic 
future in which the believer was to share, is his less 
rigorous, less systematic, but profoundly more domi- 
nating conception of the life in Christ. Even if it 
is not possible to reduce many of these personal con- 
ceptions of Paul to exact definitions, with him as 
with Jesus they are finalities of experience. The re- 
newed impulses of the Holy Spirit ; the new loyalty 
evoked by the Christ ; the enthusiasm born of a great 



THE NEW LIFE IN CHRIST 279 

hope; the sublime indifference to creature comforts 
wherever they were in contrast with the goods of the 
spiritual personality, — all these are the very heart 
of Paulinism. The centering of thought upon formal 
Paulinism has given us traditional orthodoxy and a 
misinterpretation of the cry of "Back to Christ." 
The centering of thought on these personal, vital 
elements of the apostle's teaching will give us that 
dynamic religion of the spirit which is the real con- 
tribution of Jesus to human history. Even a super- 
ficial knowledge of the history of doctrine corrobo- 
rates such a statement. A Christianity without con- 
viction is powerless, but a Christianity that has shifted 
the center of interest from supreme personal values 
to ecclesiastical conformity; that prefers plans of 
salvation to salvation itself; that raises definitions 
of the "natures" of Jesus above moral surrender 
to the joy-giving Saviour ; has always bred the spirit 
of persecution. How pathetic is the history of the 
church in those moments when, refusing to see that 
the only thing which Jesus and Paul really demanded 
is spiritual likeness with God as exhibited in Jesus, 
it has attempted to find its ultimate goods in enforced 
conformity to some philosophy masquerading as a 
gospel. 

We need to distinguish frankly between evangeli- 



28o THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

calism in the true sense and orthodoxy. Orthodoxy 
is an authoritative formulation of what certain ages 
and men believed was the content of evangelicalism. 
It is an evidence of the existence of convictions, but 
not necessarily the existence of convictions as to the 
supremacy of the gospel itself. We need to replace 
the orthodoxy which Protestantism inherited from 
Rome with the evangelicalism of Jesus and Paul. 
The modem man sees this far more plainly than 
those men who prefer the authority of councils and 
Popes and tradition, no matter by what name they 
may be called, to the authority of the Jesus who 
evoked faith in himself as God. And in thus rec- 
ognizing the "power of eternal life'^ he is more at 
one with the gospel than perhaps he thinks. 

II 

I. From the point of view of psychology this power 
of the gospel to bring spiritual forces into human 
experience is due in part to its ability to arouse faith 
in the God of Jesus. But faith, as every Christian 
knows, is something more than mere assent to creeds 
or anti-creeds. It is the making of conviction the 
basis of conduct. In the very nature of the case such 
response of the soul to what it holds to be truth is 
a released impulse. The worth of its outcome will 



THE NEW LIFE IN CHRIST 28 1 

depend upon how far the ideal by which the impulse 
is directed and given content is in accord with reality. 
Superstition is the bastard brother of faith. For 
that reason if for no other it is the duty of Christians 
to be able to give a reason for the hope that is within 
them. The gospel when once accepted becomes a 
constant source of suggestion tending to rule the per- 
sonality in its self-expression. In the same propor- 
tion as we consistently embody the impulse born of 
the evangelistic suggestions that God is love, that 
men may be saved by loyalty to Jesus, that life is 
more than living, and that goodness, service, and im- 
mortal worth are within the grasp of each of us, do 
we live the true spiritual life of faith. Our 
entire discussion has failed if it has not appeared 
that such an act of faith, bom of the acceptance of the 
gospel as reasonable and of Jesus as something more 
than a picture, is rational. 

At this point, in terms of mere psychology, Chris- 
tianity is at one with every great religion. Each has 
its elemental proposition which become the sources 
of impulse. The difference between religions lies 
in the content of the germinal teaching. The gospel 
and the message of Mahomet, for instance, both in- 
spire their followers with enthusiasm. The chief 
difference between them at this point lies in the 



282 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

quality of life which the enthusiasm of Christians 
and Mohammedans engenders. The Koran nerves 
men to absolute self-repressing devotion on the battle- 
field when Allah's will is only to be accepted. The 
gospel has stirred innumerable men to service to 
their kind as missionaries and social workers, under 
the enlightened impulse toward spiritual freedom. 
However much the modern man may doubt the 
power of the gospel to affect his own life he cannot 
fail to see that it has modified the lives of others. 
And the marvelous thing is that it has been able to 
survive the various theories and practices, the theol- 
ogies and philosophies with which it has been medi- 
ated to men. Indeed, one might almost say that the 
greatest evidence that divine power is resident in the 
gospel lies in the fact that the vagaries of its devotees 
have not neutralized its influence. 

2. It is self-evident that the saved life as presented 
in this gospel is moral, but it is not moral in the sense 
that it is under compulsion from without. The 
gospel is not a new law; it is a new power which 
enables the human soul to adjust itself into harmony 
with God and man. That is the central thought of 
Jesus and Paul. The commandment had been super- 
seded ; law had been supplanted by spiritual impera- 
tives as the slave that led the child to school was 



THE NEW LIFE IN CHRIST 283 

supplanted by the self-direction of the mature man. 
However much a man needs that moral discontent 
bom of a knowledge of sin, his spiritual life is not 
brought into self-expression by fear. It is evoked 
by Jesus. Released as far as human will can release 
from subjection to sin, it is raised into newness of life 
by a surrender to Jesus. That is the attraction of the 
cross to those whose eyes are not closed that they 
may not see. We love him because he first loved 
us. And to love him is to try to be like him. 

In the very nature of the case no other motive is 
so powerful because none is so normal. Love, not 
fear, awakens love and casts out fear. The spiritual 
life cannot be terrorized. It is free. And this free- 
dom of the sons of God is never violated by Jesus 
or the Spirit. The life that embodies that fruit of 
the spirit embodied in Jesus and evoked by a knowl- 
edge of him, has passed into a region of free per- 
sonal self-expression above statutes. Here is the 
conception of the real superman of which the 
Nietzschean is a distortion. The free spirit is he 
whose impulses are controlled and directed by an 
ideal that is the anticipation in history of humanity's 
goal. And that is the very paraphrase of Chris- 
tian faith. For that ideal is Christ. 

3. Spiritual liberty, however, is not without its 



284 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

laws. But they are those of personal relations. 
That makes the difference between liberty and license 
on the one hand and liberty and compulsion on the 
other. In its self-expression the spiritual life, as 
the gospel always insists, is conditioned by relation- 
ship with other spiritual persons, and above all with 
God. God is the final authority because He is the 
final reality. For our spiritual health demands that 
we conform and submit to His Will however it may 
be discovered. 

The gospel does not insist on merely subjective 
judgments of values. They might lead to anarchic 
confusion. Its fundamental thought is that the man 
who undertakes to make its message regnant in his 
life by his response to Jesus develops such an attitude 
of reconciliation with God that through it he finds 
moral direction. It leads men to the Light and the 
Light becomes the minister of life. Therein lies the 
possibility of a community of the Spirit, the true 
Democracy of which men dream, in which men are 
brothers rather than subjects. Therein lies also 
spiritual, not outer authority. As brotherhood is the 
outcome of sonship, spiritual living is to be controlled 
in its self-expression by loyalty to the new life itself 
as determined by its environment of God. As a man 
grows artistic in company with artists does he grow 



THE NEW LIFE IN CHRIST 285 

spiritual in company with God. *'His seed is in him 
and he cannot sin; " that is the simple psychology of 
the Spirit. *'As many as live by the Spirit, by the 
Spirit also walk;" that is its all-embracing impera- 
tive. The spiritual life does not originate such an 
imperative; it comes from a personal situation 
wherein is God willing to do His own good pleasure. 
In its interpenetration with the Absolute Person the 
human spirit reaches freedom in obedience. It 
reaches freedom because its self-expression is deter- 
mined by perfectly personal relations and therein is 
the only freedom it should ever want or ever can 
have. It reaches obedience because if there be a 
God in the universe and if we undertake to put our- 
selves in a personal relationship with Him He must 
be supreme or He is less than we. Truth does not 
save ; God saves men who — sometimes unexpect- 
edly — in the search for truth and in the honest 
attempt to embody truth, find Him and yield to Him 
as a God. A religion with simply a god-idea is a 
religion fit only for a solipsistic world — whatever 
that might be. 

In this recognition of the authority and the moral 
liberty that alike come from loving personal relations 
with God, the gospel is true to what we know of re- 
ligion itself. For if one were to analyze religion to 



286 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

its very elements it would appear that its germ, so 
to speak, is in the elemental impulse of life to pro- 
tect itself. Only in religion this protection is sought 
by getting help from environment, or some one of its 
elements conceived of personally. Man finds himself 
at the mercy of the world in the midst of which he 
lives. He extends over to it his highest ideals born 
of his experience of persons, then seeks to make the 
environment thus conceived helpful. He seeks to 
make it friendly by being friendly with it. In fact, 
with a little modification of Schleiermacher's words 
religion might be defined as an attempt to reconcile 
and so make helpful the superhuman personal envi- 
ronment upon which mankind feels itself dependent. 
Prayer is to religion what experiment is to science. 

Such a definition, it is true, may appear formal 
and abstract, but the study of religions will readily 
give it content. The impulse to gain help from a 
personal God upon whom men find themselves de- 
pendent is always operative. There is, it is true, a 
tendency in some quarters to substitute social ethics 
for religion and to make the performance of duty 
an equivalent for prayer. But such transformation 
is really contrary to the elemental and determinative 
characteristics of human nature. The gospel is 
fundamentally in accord with life itself when it re- 



THE NEW LIFE IN CHRIST 287 

fuses to eliminate the reconciling process. It makes 
the relationship of reconciliation the very center of 
its message, the Cross the symbol of its triumph. 
More than this, knowing Jesus it knows that God 
is ever ready to help, and has shown how He can help 
and would incite men to seek His help. It clears 
away all the misinterpretations which less ethical 
religions have attached to the process of reconciliation 
by presenting Jesus, the very embodiment of the 
divine life, functioning as Saviour. It maintains that 
God, so far from needing to be appeased, is reconcil- 
ing the world to Himself through Jesus. It denies 
that there is need of ritual sacrifice and finds salva- 
tion in a free personal relationship with God with 
which all forms of asceticism are grotesquely incon- 
sistent. It finds its moral imperative not in the fear 
of punishment but in full realization of the Spirit 
by whom the spiritual life is evoked, strengthened, 

and directed. 

Ill 

A man is not saved — and in the light of our 
modem knowledge of human nature how true is 
the word — until he is at one with God. He may 
indeed be living a conventionally good life ; he may 
be performing acts which, thanks to the imitative 
habit of mankind, are to all appearances like those 



288 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

that are the outcome of a genuinely regenerate life; 
yet at the same time at the center of his being he 
may be bad. 

There are in nature many analogies to this fact 
of religious imitation. Insects resemble flowers 
without possessing the life of flowers; animals act 
like human beings without being human ; flower- 
less plants so shape themselves as to resemble true 
flowers, without possessing the ability of real flowers 
to ripen into fruit that shall in turn spring into new 
life. And in all these cases the essential difference 
is the same: between the two similar objects there is 
no identity in life. 

There is, of course, another side to the matter. 
Really good deeds imply a good life behind them. 
Regeneration is sometimes so subtle a process as to 
elude consciousness and to be known only by in- 
ference. But the principle holds true: the life that 
is at one with God, that has been transformed by 
His Spirit into love that is likeness with God — that 
life only is the right life, the only basis of genuine 
morality. 

It is the old issue again which Jesus raised. 
Measured by superficial standards, the legalism of 
an arrogant Pharisee like him who once went up to 
the temple to pray, was not unlike the joyous activity 



THE NEW LIFE IN CHRIST 289 

of Peter and John, who also went up to the temple 
at the hour of prayer. But at the heart of things 
there was, and is, a profound difference. The 
legalist makes acts the end of life; the gospel makes 
acts the expression of personality. The one looks 
to separate deeds that men have agreed to call 
good; the other looks to a life which must express 
itself in deeds that are good because they spring 
from a life that is like God's, because it comes from 
God. In the very nature of the case, the Christian 
must champion the new life that blossoms out in 
impulse and finds fruitage in good deeds. We are 
not saved because we are good. We are good 
because we are saved. Good deeds are the result 
of our new life. The good tree must bring forth 
good fruit. 

There is abundant need that our preachers, waiv- 
ing all right to pass final judgment on men, should 
insist on this primary fact in religion. To neglect 
it, in the interest of an enthusiastic championship of 
a more superficial morality, is to be untrue to the 
essence of Christianity itself. We must help make 
the very center of man's being Godlike. We are 
not to insist that men should merely copy the deeds 
of Christ; we are to insist that they shall have the 
mind, the spirit, the life of Christ. A man is not a 
u 



290 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

Christian because, like Jesus, he is a carpenter. 
Honorable as is the calling of honest industry, the 
sign by which the spiritual life is to conquer is not 
a wood saw. No more is a man religious because 
he is an investigator of religion. The anchor that 
is within the veil is not in the shape of an interroga- 
tion mark, but of a cross. And the life that would 
be genuinely good must be Christlike in its de- 
pendance upon union with God. Just as a living 
organism in the physical world can bear its fruit 
only as it is in normal relation with its true environ- 
ment, can the human soul bear fruit of real good- 
ness only in personal dependence upon God. Is 
not that but another way of saying what Jesus 
said so beautifully when he declared that he was the 
vine and that his disciples were the fruitful branches ? 

For the regeneration of a sinful soul, however 
little or much its process may be clear in conscious- 
ness, however distinct or indistinct may be our 
understanding of the gracious influences of the 
Spirit that cause it, is a fact. Some day our psy- 
chologists will devote more attention to it. But even 
when it forms chapters in our text-books, it will be 
no more real than it is to-day or was in olden times. 

Paul was no mean psychologist himself. True, 
he did not have all the appliances of the modern 



THE NEW LIFE IN CHRIST 29I 

laboratory with which to test reactions of nerves. 
But for moral purposes he had something far 
better. He had **the mind of Christ.'' He saw 
that the new life that comes to the believer in Jesus 
Christ was something more than a mere unfolding 
of latent tendencies derived from one's ancestors. 
He saw that faith in Jesus brought men into vital- 
izing, transforming relations with God as truly as 
belief in a radiator as a means of heating one's cold 
hands brings the warmth of some great central fire 
to the one who transforms that belief into faith and 
goes to the radiator for its help. 

And he saw something quite as important : that 
the new life that comes from the presence of God 
expresses itself in moral impulses that — let us say 
it with all reverence — are like the moral impulses 
of God. The fruit of the Spirit was love, joy, 
peace, kindness, goodness. If a man puts such 
impulses into action, he is moral. For what else is 
morality than to live out the new life — the divine 
life which is really ours because God is working 
with us? In comparison with such gracious spon- 
taneous morality as this, what can the legalist offer ? 
What, indeed, but the very sort of life against 
which Paul warned the Galatians! 

We are always in danger of judging character by 



292 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

counting up and comparing the sums of so-called 
good and evil deeds. We are always tempted to 
urge men to do things rather than to gain this up- 
springing impulse that comes from the life with 
God. But when we look to this easier and often 
more popular morality we are mistaking the very 
laws of the universe in which we live. We may 
tie grapes to thorns and delude ourselves into a 
genial optimism that we have wrought a miracle. 
But as long as nature is nature, to raise grapes we 
must plant grapevines. 

The chief business of the preacher of the gospel 
is not to urge men to be good, but to show them 
how by coming to and living with God they may 
become good. Reform springs from regeneration. 
It can never replace it. The moment our churches 
confuse the two they are in danger of losing their 
birthright. We must needs preach ethics, both of 
the individual and of society; but ethics, like legal- 
ism, is not the gospel. The chiefest blessing of the 
Christian is not the call to do things for God, but 
the gracious promise that God will do things for 

and in him. 

IV 

It is plain therefore that there is nothing magical 
in the gospel. No man can be saved a bad man. 



THE NEW LIFE IN CHRIST 293 

No man can be saved an unforgiving man. No 
man can be saved except as a spiritual person. To 
be saved is to be saved not for something future 
but to membership in a world which is even now 
in process toward spiritual ends. The newness of 
life in Christ is a moral newness which expresses 
itself primarily in faith energized by love. A man 
is unchristian in the same proportion that he is 
selfish. The spiritual man is instinctively social. 
He wants not the separate star of Kipling, but the 
Holy City of John. The working of the Holy 
Spirit is always altruistic. A life in Christ is a life 
like Christ's. The spiritual life that seeks simply 
to save itself for the enjoyment of heaven is un- 
spiritual. To cling to the cross may be refined 
selfishness, but to bear the cross is to let the spiritual 
life express its true social character in service to 
others and, what is sometimes vastly more trying, 
in service with others. 

If it were for no other reason than the cost of 
a life like Christ's, we should be impressed by its 
seriousness. We are dealing here with the very 
elementals of personality. Sacraments, theologies, 
organizations, — all are secondary and functional. 
The church must be done with magnifying the 
perimeter of the spiritual life. 



294 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

Men of all sorts, but particularly modem men, 
are restless until this elemental life finds its proper 
environment of truth and God. That is no slight 
demand, nor one to be ignored in the interests of 
popularity and statistics. You cannot entertain 
men into self-denial. Religion cannot be surrepti- 
tiously introduced between stereopticon slides. If 
this life in Christ is mere form, men want to know 
it. If, as the gospel asserts, it is_^the only true life, 
they want it made paramount. 

V 

It is always difficult to convince the man who 
has starved his impulse to get help through per- 
sonal relationship with the God of help, that any- 
thing real comes from such a personal relationship 
as the gospel insists is established by making Jesus 
supreme in one's life; yet such a person has only 
to look about him to see how influential such a con- 
ception of life is. 

The language of experience when once it is 
loosed from the bonds of conventional phraseology 
is a language that needs no lexicon. Priam beg- 
ging the body of Hector, Achilles the wrathful, 
Ulysses the much enduring, are no strangers to us. 
We meet them on our streets. The grief that 



THE NEW LIFE IN CHRIST 295 

killed Eli kills men to-day. David's agony of 
love and remorse leaps still from the lips of fathers. 
Three thousand years and more have passed since 
a slave mother would not let her little boy be killed ; 
near four thousand since Jacob toiled seven years 
twice over for the love he bore his Rachel; but 
mother love and romance have not yet perished 
from the earth. 

That Christian experience in which men surren- 
der to the Spirit is as much a unit. Men tell their 
stories in different words, but they mean the same 
thing. They set forth "plans of salvation" satis- 
factory enough to themselves but unintelligible to 
others. They label each other by their differences 
and forget that God has made all His true children 
of the same spiritual stock. Yet when they speak in 
terms of experience they see eye to eye. They realize 
that their words are of necessity the mirrors of their 
time, what their teachers have taught them. Strip 
off this husk and they will find within the whole 
family of God something common to the Christian 
centuries — tlie salvation of a soul as it turns to 
God revealed in Jesus Christ. 

A wayward genius in the agony of remorse opens 
the Bible for a message. The first verse upon 
which his eye falls is to him the word of God. His 



296 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

life is changed and out from the heart of his pas- 
sionate metaphysics Augustine cries: "Lord, Thou 
hast made us for Thyself, and our heart is restless 
until it repose in Thee." A brilliant young man of 
twenty-one is riding through the forest of France 
to join in one of the castle stormings of the Middle 
Ages. He knows that his work lies elsewhere than 
among wild adventures, but he persists in his re- 
bellious mood. In the midst of the forest he comes 
suddenly upon a church, God's voice in stone. 
And Bernard the adventurer, the future Bernard 
of Clairvaux the Saint, like Saul of old, falls from 
his horse and there on his knees in the wayside 
chapel "he lifts up his hands to heaven and pours 
forth his heart like water in the presence of the 
Lord." A gay man of thirty lies on his couch 
composing a love sonnet. A vision of the Holy 
Virgin stops his pen. He tries again. Again the 
Virgin. He yields to the vision, and Raymond 
Lull the man of the world becomes Raymond Lull 
the martyr to trinitarianism among the Moslems. 
A German student is overtaken in a thunder shower; 
the lightning strikes at his feet. "Help! Anna, 
blessed Saint ! I will be a monk," he prays. It is 
the beginning of the deeper religious life of Martin 
Luther. 



THE NEW LIFE EST CHRIST 297 

And so again and again it happens. Every man, 
be he great or commonplace, meets the saving 
God in a different way. Christians tell their 
stories in different words, but their experience is 
at bottom the same. These men could never have 
agreed in every item of doctrine, but they all experi- 
enced God as they saw Him redemptively revealed 
in Jesus. That is the eternal equivalent, nay the 
very content of the messianic valuation of the first 
Christians. 

Definitions, however, must here yield to words 
that symbolize without limiting appreciation. The 
more simply such appreciation is voiced, the easier 
do one man's words become the prophecy of an- 
other. Our great hymns are the pledge of a com- 
mon life in Christ. A Unitarian wrote ''In the 
cross of Christ I glory"; a Roman Catholic wrote 
"Lead, kindly light"; a Plymouth Brother, 
"Jesus, thy name I love"; a Congregationalist, 
"Jesus, thou joy of loving hearts"; an Episco- 
palian, "There is a fountain filled with blood"; 
a Methodist, "Love divine, all love excelling"; a 
Baptist, "He leadeth me"; a Presbyterian boy of 
ten years, " Jesus and shall it ever be a mortal man 
ashamed of thee." Yet who of the thousands who 
daily sing these songs of faith asks or cares whether 



298 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

their authors agreed in their theories of the atone- 
ment or of the trinity ? 

The conscience-stirring, faith-evoking Jesus of 
Nazareth, who, amidst the flux of words in which 
men have tried to explain his person, has, through 
the centuries, satisfied man's hunger for a know- 
able, reconciled God, given the perfect revelation 
of the spiritual life that is eternal, and proclaimed 
the certainty of the life to come, is an unchanging 
element of a Christianity that ever seeks to adapt 
the gospel to a changing order. 

If the modern man cannot understand or accept an 
inherited Christology, he can at least in the depths 
of his own spiritual life serve the real Person whose 
redemptive energy doctrine seeks to estimate and 
enforce. And in serving him he will know the 
power as well as the struggle of the emancipated, 
victorious, spiritual life. 



CHAPTER X 

THE POWER OF THE SOCIAL GOSPEL 

The modem mind cannot stop with the indi- 
vidual. It must pass on to the extra-individual. 
We are seeing now as never before that a man is 
more than he seems to be. Whatever may be our 
philosophy as to heredity, it is certainly true that 
every life inevitably responds in one way or another 
to that environment in which it is integrated. But 
that environment ceases to be merely external to the 
life. The two constitute a situation which is not 
susceptible of absolute analysis, but which must be 
treated as a imit. The tree cannot live apart from 
the soil, and the soil lives in the tree. 

Similarly in the case of the spiritual life. So 
dependent is it, as genuine life, upon the social 
order in which it finds itself as to be inseparable 
therefrom. That outer world of nature, concerning 
which we speak so glibly, is truly also an inner 
world, part and parcel of ourselves. Even more 
intimate if possible is that world of personality of 
which we are socially ourselves a part. Change it 

299 



30O THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

and the soul changes. Change the soul and the 
environment is changed. For both alike constitute 
that spiritual situation in which we come to con- 
sciousness, and which must itself progress toward 
the kingdom of God. 

Such truths as this are not novel. They are 
simply reexpressed in terms of a nascent philosophy. 
Jesus himself taught them when he held forth the 
kingdom of God as that of which the individual must 
be a member in order to taste the fullest joy. We 
have already seen that, eschatological as that hope 
may have been, it never ceased to be social. How- 
ever great the difference between the Christian con- 
ception of the kingdom of God and the Jewish ideal 
of the kingdom of saints to be founded at Jeru- 
salem, they are alike in the belief that the final 
consummation of the deliverance of the individual 
will be in his fullness of life in an ideal society within 
which God is supreme. 

It is worth while dwelling a moment upon this 
truth which may seem hardly more than a platitude, 
for many of the world's great religious teachers 
have emphasized the necessity of the holy man's 
withdrawal from human ties, like family and state 
and business. The celibate, rather than the father, 
has been the type of sanctity to more than one great 



THE POWER OF THE SOCIAL GOSPEL 30I 

religion. Even in our own world there are those 

who hold that religion has nothing to do with 

social problems and that the message of the gospel 

is exclusively one of the individual's salvation in a 

world to come. 

I 

The evangelizing of society will not be without 
struggle and vicarious suffering on the part of those 
who dare become its agents. 

Our modem world suspects that the gospel is not 
adjustable to our social life. As has already been 
indicated in a previous chapter, the modem order 
which has resulted from the century-long develop- 
ment of civilization sets its special approval upon 
activity and strength. Its most praised man is 
the man who wins. Courage, daring, limitless 
expenditure of oneself and one's possessions, a ca- 
pacity to control men and to beat one's enemies, — 
these are the acknowledged virtues of a commercial 
age. And to a considerable extent they are the 
virtues of culture. For the man of culture, how- 
ever much he may sneer at commercialism, has a 
deep-seated admiration and even a secret envy of 
the man whose activities find results that are con- 
crete and measurable. 

Over against these accepted virtues of our modem 



302 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

world stands the gospel with its insistence on the 
primacy of love and its inevitably consequent self- 
sacrifice. It is little wonder that an age that builds 
Dreadnaughts should find unintelligible the words 
of Jesus regarding non-resistance to evil. For 
how is it possible for an age that honors the vic- 
tories of force to appreciate, in anything more than 
an aesthetic way, the victories of the cross ? 

All this is, of course, only another form oi the 
age-long conflict between the spiritual and the 
natural orders, of which the gospel is so conscious. 
The doctrine of the two ages which came over into 
Christianity as an integral part of its inheritance 
from messianism is simply an unphilosophical way 
of looking at a conflict seen by all thinkers since 
thought began. The world of spiritual values has 
always been confronted with the world of material 
forces and standards. But this is a very different 
thing from saying that the spiritual values as de- 
scribed by Jesus presuppose a world of impassivity. 
Salvation is not Nirvana. Jesus' call to love is a 
call to the sublimest heroism. The courage of the 
Greek is inferior to the courage of the Christian, for 
physical courage may be simply a recklessness bom 
of a lack of imagination. The gospel's recognition 
of the supremacy of the spiritual order demands a 



THE POWER OF THE SOCIAL GOSPEL 303 

spiritual courage. What else is the call of Jesus 
to his followers to take up their crosses, or of those 
martial words of Paul with which he describes the 
armor of the man of God or urges Timothy to 
*' fight the good fight of faith?" The note of con- 
flict runs throughout the entire New Testament. 
In very truth Jesus cast fire and sword upon the 
earth. The Christian in his devotion to the life of 
the spirit faces innumerable enemies to be overcome 
at all costs. And some of these enemies are of his 
own economic household. 

The most striking evidence of the aggressive 
power of the spiritual life to defend its own ideals 
against even internecine assaults is the life of Jesus. 
He was no more a Nitzschean superman than he 
was effeminate. While other men have cham- 
pioned spiritual life by the use of unspiritual weapons, 
Jesus refused success even at the cost of the king- 
dom of the spirit. If he opposed the unspiritual 
world of Pharisaism, he did it wholly with the 
weapons and in accord with the laws of the spiritual 
order. Hypocrisy, selfishness, pride, insincerity, — 
these were the sins he attacked in his opponents. 
His language, extreme as it is, will always be found 
to emphasize the supremacy of the spiritual. 

Now the struggle of our modem day is much 



304 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

like the struggle of Jesus. The gospel of the su- 
premacy of the spiritual life bom of and like that 
of the God of Love, is confronted by modem Sad- 
ducees, who deny the existence of everything beyond 
the physical world; by modern Pharisees, who are 
seeking to erect a hedge of dogma about the gospel 
itself; by commercialized traitors, who wish to make 
Christianity a propaganda of comfort. Outside of 
religious affiliations we find the avowed champions 
of force and materialism and pleasure. All these 
enemies must be met in strictest loyalty to the mo- 
tives of the spiritual life, in patience, without mis- 
representation or the lowering of spiritual self- 
respect. But such opposition requires more than 
mere passive resistance to evil. In the same pro- 
portion as the spiritual life is controlled by the 
ideals of the gospel it will be heroic. The sacrifice 
to which it calls is that of everything which is un- 
spiritual. Such a conflict demands a heroism 
vastly more difficult than that of the battle field, 
and a devotion to the rights of the community far 
more searching than that of even patriotism itself. 

II 

It goes without saying that such a conflict can- 
not be waged in the spirit of academic neutrality. 



THE POWER OF THE SOCIAL GOSPEL 305 

Among all the constructive forces none is mightier 
than a socialized hatred of that which is lower than 
the known best. Good men have always been haters 
of the bad. Bad men have been haters of the good. 
As Paul says, "The flesh lusteth against the 
spirit and the spirit against the flesh, for these are con- 
trary the one to the other. '* Throughout human 
history great movements have come as men have 
hated unrighteousness in institutions and practices. 
No reform or revolution ever was successful on any 
other condition. It is such hatred which distin- 
guishes the practical reformer who knows good can- 
not be erected except on the ruins of that which is bad 
from the doctrinaire. No man ever illustrated this 
better than Jesus. In him we see not only the ideal 
champion of everything that is pure and of good 
repute, but also the irrespressible hater of everything 
that is low and mean and hypocritical. The posses- 
sion of this sort of hatred makes love more than good 
nature. How can a man be devoted to the spiritual 
life without fighting all that opposes its very exist- 
ence ? He that is not for Jesus is against him. 

1. The social power of the gospel will be com- 
mensurate with its power to rouse a hatred of sin, 
— not of sin as a theological abstraction, but of sin 
as we have seen it actually working its way out in op- 



3o6 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

pression and sorrow and personal decay, whether it 
be in the world of politics or of industry or of the 
home. The Christian community may not have the 
impatient hatred of capitalism which gives vigor to 
socialism, but it must give no quarter to any 
social institution that makes material surplus su- 
preme, whether it favor the capitalist or the laborer. 
The Christian cannot be content to hold to ideals ; 
he must fight the enemy of ideals. The sword of 
the spirit is not for full-dress occasions. 

The ability to make such hatred of evil a nucleus 
for the defense of Christian ideals is to be seen every- 
where in our modern life, though not always in the 
widest possible communities. There is the hatred 
of the liquor traffic, particularly of the saloon, which 
has proved itself in concerted action; there is the 
hatred of the white slave traffic, which is developing 
into a national movement ; there is the hatred of op- 
pression, superstition, and hypocrisy, which, though 
by no means socialized as yet, is appreciably a nucleus 
not only of denunciation but of constructive idealism. 
In all quarters hatred of that which destroys is an 
ally of that which is helping to build up. 

2. It is no reply to such an estimate of the severer 
side of spiritual life as it appears in the gospel to say 
that we must be tolerant. Tolerance does not ex- 



THE POWER OF THE SOCIAL GOSPEL 307 

tend over to sin. The scientific spirit as it touches 
the religious should not be permitted to take from 
the modem man his sense of the difference between 
goodness and badness. For tolerance, even in the 
region of beliefs, too often is only a euphemism for 
indifference. Real tolerance is thoroughly consist- 
ent with a passionate hatred of everything ignoble 
and demoralizing. It is well to emphasize this dis- 
tinction. For the modem man is tempted to look 
on other people's religious hopes and convictions 
much as a traveler looks out upon the people of a land 
through which he journeys. He is an observer, not a 
missionary. Foreigners do not live as he lives, do 
not dress as he dresses, but he does not undertake to 
convert them. Thus in the case of his neighbors. 
They do not believe as he believes ; they do not think 
as he thinks. But he does not care to discuss matters 
with them. Let one of them attempt to convert 
him, and he hardly knows whether to consider the 
attempt an insult or material for an after-dinner story. 
It is a sad mistake to call this attitude of mind tol- 
erance. A man must have moral convictions before 
he can possess that virtue. Those polite writers 
who regard religion as a survival of some prehistoric 
ancestor and prefer devotion to the social organ- 
ism which they have invented to a God whom they 



308 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

are attempting to expose, can hardly be expected to 
appreciate other men's sensitiveness to their attack 
on those religious convictions that have become the 
basis of morality itself. Those men who light- 
heartedly remove these religious bases of definite 
Christian morality in the name of a scientific method 
are no more necessarily tolerant than is the surgeon 
who performs a successful operation on a patient who 
dies. Even when they are willing that a man should 
believe something, they do not want him to believe it 
too vigorously. Yet even they are very apt to be in- 
tolerant when they believe their indifference is threat- 
ened. The man who holds that he is morally better 
in proportion to the number of his beliefs is no more 
rasping in his criticism of critics than is the man who 
rejoices in his belief that he believes little or nothing. 
There is no dogmatism so intolerant as that of un- 
belief. 

Tolerance is the child of conviction and love. It 
never had any other parentage. To believe strongly 
and yet doubt one's omniscience is no small achieve- 
ment, but to believe strongly and yet permit a man 
who does not agree with you theologically also to 
believe strongly is one of the supreme achievements 
of the spiritual life. Fanaticism easily becomes a 
constructive force with fanatics, but the tolerance 



THE POWER OF THE SOCIAL GOSPEL 309 

that the gospel preaches is a constructive force with 
men whose work outlasts generations of fanaticism. 
For, changing the center of interest from doctrine to 
life, it demands community in the spiritual life which 
opposes the enemies of that life whoever they may be. 
It must oppose a philosophy that denies supremacy 
to the spiritual order in theory, and it must even more 
vigorously oppose customs, institutions, and privi- 
leges that deny it in fact. A man cannot serve God 
and any form of materialism. The good fight of 
faith is not a sham battle. 

Ill 

The social organ of a spiritual life that is aggres- 
sive on both its destructive and its constructive sides 
is the church. 

Christian experience has large social significance 
only when it is institutionalized. Christianity is not 
a philosophy, but a movement inaugurated by his- 
torical persons. Of necessity it involved its institu- 
tions. The church is built upon the foundation 
of the apostle as truly as that of the prophet. 
Each of these two servants of the kingdom of God 
had his message, but the prophet's work was done 
when he uttered his warning and his exhortation. 
Men might then make their choice between faith and 



3IO THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

unfaith. But the apostle institutionalized his mes- 
sage in the church ; therefore has it become a social 
power. 

No social institution is at the present time sub- 
jected to more criticism than that of organized 
Christianity. Particularly is it customary to condemn 
the church of to-day because of the mistakes of the 
church of yesterday. And such criticism is not with- 
out its justification. The higher the ideals of an insti- 
tution, the greater harvest of spiritual goods do we 
rightly demand of it. Any student of history knows 
only too well how far the church has yielded to the 
limitations set by the simple fact that its members 
are human and subject to the laws of social solidarity 
and process. In all times it has found its methods 
as well as its teachings conditioned by the state of 
society in the midst of which it lived. In the same 
proportion, also, in which it has become identified 
with the state and has offered opportunity for political 
ambition has it attracted men of unspiritual type to 
its membership and often to its leadership. 

But such criticism may overreach itself. I am far 
enough from saying that the church, whether Greek, 
Roman, or Protestant, has been all that it should have 
been, but he is a prejudiced critic who fails to see 
the wonderful contribution which the church, in even 



THE POWER OF THE SOCIAL GOSPEL 3H 

its imperfect institutionalizing of the ideals of the 
gospel, has made to the development of the spiritual 
life of the race. Insincere, selfish, bigoted as eccle- 
siasticism has too often been, cautious as are many of 
its present leaders in making any genuinely social 
application of its teachings, it is undeniable that at all 
times, whether past or present, the church has been 
morally superior to its age. The modem man who 
loses patience with it as an institution, who sees only 
its faults and magnifies its too frequent recurrence 
to the authority of organization rather than to the 
authority of the spirit, is untrue to the very concep- 
tion of historical process by which his thinking is 
controlled. The church of to-day has its obscurant 
leaders ; its leaders who have lost their bearings ; its 
leaders who are apparently anxious to throw it into 
bankruptcy; but it is none the less the one great in- 
stitution of the times which is deliberately endeavor- 
ing to socialize the fundamental principles of the 
spiritual life as they are set forth in the life and teach- 
ing of Jesus. It is indispensable in the same pro- 
portion as he is indispensable. The modem man 
should throw his weight into its already awakened 
life. 

Such an obligation is all the greater because the 
church needs the enlarged social sympathies which 



312 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

are his. Take our modern world as a whole, and it 
will be found true that those men and women who 
are most intent upon social regeneration are those 
possessed of the modem spirit. But it will be just 
as true that if their spiritual genealogy could be 
traced, it would be found to be rooted in the Christian 
church. It is a sad mistake from the point of view 
of both the church and of society, to have their 
broad sympathies and their new perception of social 
values lost to the Christian community. 

In the same proportion as this new social sympathy 
gives content to the expression of the spiritual life 
will it be in accord with the real purpose of the gospel. 
For, restrained by the expectations of the speedy 
coming of Christ as were the early Christians, their 
new life, begotten by faith in Christ, had its inevitable 
social results. Modern Christians will be true to the 
principle of the gospel when they, too, deal with the 
brganic, rather than the accidental, aspects of the 
regenerate life. And their great mediums of expres- 
sion will be the churches themselves. 

2. Within the church the hatred of social in- 
justice and sin can be both institutionalized and pro- 
tected from developing into merely class hatred. 
Whatever may be said of individual churches the 
church universal includes all strata of society. In 



THE POWER OF THE SOCIAL GOSPEL 313 

the same proportion as they realize their real commu- 
nity of life will denominations and schools of Chris- 
tians divert their energies from internecine warfare 
to an attack upon those materialistic forces which 
constitute their common enemy. 

The atmosphere of struggle is dangerous to every 
earnest soul. Hatred of sin if it be not, as in the case 
of Jesus, subject to the control of love, may lead to 
hateful dispositions. In making the destruction of 
abuse and the punishment of oppression a part of his 
self-expression, a man needs continually to be taught 
that such negative activity is preparatory to the 
constructive process along lines of brotherhood. 
Socialism sees this in part, but the Christian 
church will find here an outstanding opportunity 
for social service. 

3. The church must stand for the worth of men 
in all efiforts for amelioration. For it preeminently 
recognizes the fact that such worth is to be found, 
not in men as they are, but in men as they can be- 
come through the making of the spiritual life su- 
preme. Here, if anywhere, do we find the social 
power of the evangelic message of the eternal life. 

The first great requisite of any such spiritualiz- 
ing of social evolution is a profound sympathy 
with all those who are distressed in mind, body, or 



314 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

estate. Like its Christ, the really loving soul bears 
the infirmities of the social order. Nor is this any 
easy service. It is one of the anomalies of altruism 
that it tends to protect itself in its ministrations to 
others with the callus of professionalism. Nor is 
this to be indiscriminately condemned. We do not 
want the physician's sympathy, but his skill. Simi- 
larly, all amelioration of the diseases of society, 
whether they be economic, political, or domestic, 
must be controlled by an intelligent diagnosis. Un- 
enlightened sympathy may be as injurious in the 
social world as in the medical. 

But this is farthest from saying that the Christian 
life should not be controlled by sympathy. It has too 
often been true that the church has been content to 
save individuals from the world without countenanc- 
ing the aspirations for greater social justice in this 
world on the part of the very persons whom it would 
save in the next. It is always easier to organize 
crusades to rescue some sacred place from far dis- 
tant Turks than to liberate the peasantry on one's 
own estates. It is always easier to move a church 
to the suburbs than to maintain it as a contribution 
to the spiritual needs of the slums or the boarding- 
house district. I am not surprised that men who are 
devoting their lives to obtaining social justice for the 



THE POWER- OF THE SOCIAL GOSPEL 315 

oppressed should grow impatient of an institution 
which, while proclaiming the supremacy of the spirit- 
ual worth of man, is too often indifferent to cus- 
toms and institutions which treat men as impersonal 
cogs in political or industrial machines. We need 
to learn the great lesson of Jesus that devotion to 
things of the spirit must express itself as social 
sympathy in such concrete situations as of citizen- 
ship, marriage, industry, and culture. 

But in its sympathy with the spiritual needs and 
possibilities of humanity and in its opposition to 
everything that is hostile to spiritual worth, the 
church should not be led into indiscriminate at- 
tempts to supplant the work of other social insti- 
tutions. Its primary interest is not in good sewers, 
shorter hours of labor, a living wage, and old-age 
pensions. It is rather in the development of the 
spiritual life which is threatened by a refusal to 
grant such rights. But organized religion cannot 
be indifferent to evils. It cannot substitute a com- 
placent hope as to individuals for an earnest effort 
to mitigate conditions that limit the number of such 
individuals more heartlessly than any doctrine of 
election. The recognition of social solidarity is 
compelling the modem man to bring the ideals of 
the gospel into transforming relationship with the 



3l6 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

social forces themselves. Thus in its work of 
ameliorating the condition of those who are suffer- 
ing from the miseries which have resulted from civili- 
zation, the church can often render its best service in 
cooperation with social institutions like hospitals, 
organized charities, civic reform. For charity itself 
is in constant need of being inspired to fasten its 
eye singly upon the worth of human souls as well as of 
human bodies. Professional good Samaritans should 
be helped to preserve the power to sympathize per- 
sonally with the unfortunate. Impersonal charity 
is on the road to impersonal sociological technique. 

4. If the church is more than a good Samaritan 
it must undertake to evangelize the great formative 
forces which are making to-morrow. Only thus 
can it socialize constructively the spiritual life of its 
individual members. Social discontent, the up- 
ward movement of the wage-earning classes, the 
rapid consolidation of social classes, the absorbing 
question of socializing capital, are all to a high de- 
gree in danger of substituting economic and even 
more pronouncedly materialistic ideals for that 
spiritual impulse which they really embody. To 
socialize the spiritual life means to spiritualize the 
formative forces of society by means of individuals 
trained to social sympathies. But just as truly it 



THE POWER OF THE SOCIAL GOSPEL 317 

means new legislation, institutions, customs, which 
embody the spiritual rather than the economic 
values of men and women; the extension of the 
principle of atonement to the reconciliation of 
social classes, as it once reconciled in one body Jew 
and Gentile; the inspiration of such threatening 
social forces as the desire for play and amusements. 

At this point the function of the church is, per- 
haps, more clearly seen by the modern man than by 
the man who has standardized the past. But such 
men themselves need to be taught that sociology is 
not the substitute for the gospel. For they are con- 
stantly exposed to the temptation to withdraw sym- 
pathy from organized Christianity and to live a life 
of impassioned helpfulness to their world in oppo- 
sition to what they allege to be only the hypo- 
critical profession of the principles of the gospel. 
Every doctrine of the Christian church has its social 
aspect, but most of all those doctrines which center 
about the ultimate values of the spiritual life — faith 
and love and Christlike sacrifice for others. 

5. The gospel must socialize the spirit of Cal- 
vary. Society cannot be saved as it is. It, like the 
individual, must partake of the death of Christ. 
Love cannot fully express itself while our social 
order permits selfishness to succeed. Many an 



3l8 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

institution and practice must be ended. Obviously 
such a putting off of the social ''flesh" will not be 
without cost. Men cling tenaciously to illegitimate 
possessions, whether they be wealth, privilege, or 
prejudices, and they abandon them with agony. 
But abandon them they must as our social order 
comes increasingly under the sway of ideals of jus- 
tice and love. History has no clearer lesson. The 
cry of little children with lives crushed in mills and 
mines, the mute appeal of ignorant masses forced 
toward brutishness, the ever louder challenge of 
women forced from home into depressing indus- 
tries, will not pass unanswered. Their answer will 
mean loss. One great mission of the gospel is to 
educate men to let such loss come as sacrifice rather 
than as coerced surrender. Such education cannot 
be accomplished overnight. It presupposes slow- 
growing social sympathy and wise counsels. But 
without it social progress will be by revolution 
rather than by that sacrificial unfolding of love 
which Jesus illustrated and to which he calls men. 
If such socializing of the spiritual impulses shall 
come to compel an extensive reorganization of so- 
ciety, that is only what is to be expected if every 
knee is to bow to Jesus Christ and the will of God 
is to be done on earth as it is in heaven. 



THE POWER OF THE SOCIAL GOSPEL 319 

Yet even the prospect of a new social order is not 
to blind the Christian community to its unspectacular 
mission to the spiritual life of the individual. There 
may be regenerate men without there being a thor- 
oughly regenerate society; but a regenerate society 
cannot be composed of unregenerate men. We 
need revivals if we are not to need revolutions ; chil- 
dren growing up in the fear of the Lord more than 
juvenile courts; illuminated men more than illumi- 
nating programs. And it is the business of the 
church to see that such men are forthcoming; men 
of vision, of social sympathy, with consciences 
trained from childhood to see the moral obligations 
of corporations and labor unions, each ready to take 
up his cross and to teach society to take up its cross. 
Christians need to be taught the virility of such sac- 
rificial life, for they are in danger of being feminized 
to the point of submission to a laissez-faire opti- 
mism. Society needs to be taught to share in the 
adventure of a love which chooses the spiritual in 
preference to the merely economic. A vicarious 
tenth must replace the submerged tenth. If Christ- 
like activity is not socialized, social evolution will 
pass through a materialistic stage in which there 
will be a Caiaphas and a Pilate establishing a Cal- 
vary in every township. 



320 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

6. No defeat of the immanent God can be final. 
That is the supreme message of the gospel. Gog 
and Magog with all their hosts cannot withstand 
the God of Law and Love. His kingdom is inevi- 
table. That is the scepter of courage and hope the 
gospel stretches out to men who are striving to 
regenerate the social order. They are working 
together with the God of a process that has a goal, 
and in the midst of human nature which, with a 
Christ in it, is salvable. This age can really be 
made a better age, because God can work through 
institutions and lives devoted to spiritual good. 
To doubt this is to doubt that God is immanent in 
His world and even more to doubt that society is 
being brought by Him into fuller expression of those 
higher forces which have already appeared in 
individuals. 

It is here that we see the social significance of the 
prayer for the doing of God's will on earth which 
Jesus taught his disciples; of that splendid optimism 
which lay in the belief that he was the Christ; of 
that hope which awaited his messianic activity; 
and of that faith which saw in God not only Creator 
but Father. To teach men to pray that prayer, 
to share in that optimism, to be saved by that hope, 
and to be steadied by that faith is the business of 



THE POWER OF THE SOCIAL GOSPEL 321 

theology and of the church. We need to pray for 
the coming of the kingdom no less; but no person 
can honestly pray that God's will shall be done 
without undertaking to do it. In the same pro- 
portion as Christian men fail at this point will they 
lose the support of those heroic souls who have 
given themselves to the furtherance of human weal 
in full determination to improve our present social 
order. For the gospel of the spiritual life is greater 
than the church. Only as the church is a servant 
of the kingdom has it a right to exist. To doubt 
that God is working in extra-ecclesiastical efforts at 
social betterment is to come dangerously near the 
sin against the Holy Spirit. In the same propor- 
tion as we grasp the content of the gospel do we see 
that God brings in His kingdom by any man who is 
working in the spirit of Jesus Christ. The history 
of the fourth and the seventeenth centuries shows 
lamentably that when the church has centered at- 
tention upon doctrinal precision it has become a non- 
conductor between God and His world. But such 
centuries as the first and the sixteenth show also that 
it has been the chief channel through which God 
has led men forward toward the abolition of un- 
righteous privilege and the elevation of the worth of 
human life. The twentieth century is already de- 



322 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

manding a church that works rather than a church 
that anathematizes. 

Such facts are guideposts to the modem man who 
has made the gospel his own. Truth can never be 
established by argument alone; it must work out 
vitally the peaceable fruits of righteousness in a 
very real world that will move either toward God 
or toward Mammon. Such fruits, since they are 
in accord with God's will, must make the gospel 
appear more gloriously true and final. Faith with- 
out works is not merely dead; it was still-bom. 

IV 

The task of making the spiritual values of the 
gospel supreme throughout our modem life is made 
more difficult because of the present transitional 
situation within the church itself. The fact that 
the spiritual life must find its expression in accord 
with elements of culture and other phases of our 
experience will always serve to bring about diver- 
gence of opinion. There never has been a time 
when all Christians agreed as to all theological 
formulas in which the gospel should be expressed. 
The New Testament church had its parties; the 
church of the first century its innumerable heretics; 
the Middle Ages its sects and rival schoolmen; the 



THE POWER OF THE SOCIAL GOSPEL 323 

period of the Reformation its Anabaptists. So, 
too, the modem world has its divisions between 
Greek, Roman, and Protestant Christianity, and 
among Protestants the extraordinary spectacle of 
innumerable denominations and sects. Yet, in- 
credible as it sounds, all this division and sub- 
division is an attempt to set forth in some desirable 
polity and doctrine that which is common to all 
Christians — faith in Jesus and a consequent new- 
ness of life due to fellowship with God. 

Of late there has developed a cross division of these 
historical alignments, notwithstanding the steady 
movement toward ecclesiastical cooperation be- 
tween the great bodies of Protestantism. This new 
grouping is along lines which are determined by 
the presuppositions with which men come to the 
exposition of the gospel. On the one side there are 
Protestants who would have all spiritual life con- 
trolled by the formulas of the past, thus standard- 
izing the theological status quo which was set in the 
days of Luther and Calvin and in some cases even 
in the days of Augustine. On the other hand are 
men who would make the spiritual life begotten by 
the gospel superior to a doctrinal conformity, which 
is only another word for an impracticable uniform- 
ity. They seek correct doctrines but not doc- 



324 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

trinal correctness. They are Modernists within 
Protestantism. The situation is strikingly like 
that which existed in the New Testament church 
subsequent to the appearance of Paul. The primi- 
tive Christian insisted upon the maintenance of 
divinely authorized Mosaic legalism as a part of 
the new religion. The Pauline group, composed of 
people whose past was radically different from that 
of the primitive Christians, insisted that the primary 
thing was not conformity to God's will as known to 
the past but to God's will as expressed in what the 
primitive Christians of Jerusalem themselves be- 
lieved to be paramount — the new life in the spirit 
induced by faith in Jesus as Christ. 

In our modern world of Protestantism there is the 
primitive Jerusalem church of doctrinal precision, 
and there is the Gentile church of the modem mind. 
Neither can claim to be the superior of the other in 
point of spiritual life, for each confesses the ex- 
periential knowledge that the fundamental element 
of all faith is the gospel of salvation revealed by 
Jesus. The real line of cleavage lies in the differ- 
ent values placed upon the doctrinal legalism of 
ecclesiasticism. One party is perfectly sincere in 
insisting that there is no genuine Christianity ex- 
cept as men believe in the infallibility and perma- 



THE POWER OF THE SOCIAL GOSPEL 325 

nent authority of the inspired Scripture, the Nicaean 
formulas for the person of Jesus and the Anselmic, 
legal formulas for the doctrine of the atonement. 
The other party insists that it too would have the 
truth as it is in Jesus, but that it believes in the in- 
spiration of the Scriptures as the progressive revela- 
tion of God's will known in the experience of the 
spiritual life of God; in Jesus as a unique and 
individualized revelation of God in history with- 
out full pronouncement as to the metaphysical, 
premundane nature of a Logos; in the necessity of 
the death of the Christ as an integral part of his 
vocation as Saviour. Yet to the one party as to the 
other God has spoken in the regenerate life bom of 
Himself. To both the gospel is a positive, vital 
message of salvation. 

Can these two parties work together within those 
denominations which still seem economically needed 
as arms of the army of the Lord? Or shall Prot- 
estantism be still further divided at the very mo- 
ment when it is beginning what seems an epoch- 
making cooperation of all Protestant forces in the 
interests of a united front against evil? 

If the sane counsels of the Spirit prevail, there 
can be but one answer to such questions. The two 
wings of Protestantism can unite in the common 



326 THE GOSPEL AND THE MODERN MAN 

campaign of evangelicalism. To keep for a mo- 
ment the military figure, let each arm have its uni- 
form, its accoutrements, its organization, its com- 
pany drillmasters, and its battle flags. But let 
them remember that they have the same watchword, 
the same general, and the same Fatherland. Let 
them fight their common enemy, not each other. 
We have been for many a year singing that we are 
marching like a mighty army. It is time to stop 
marching. The engagement has begun ! 

Thus we reach the end of our discussion at the 
very heart of the gospel. The spiritual life is not a 
social surplus to be enjoyed only by those who have 
shared in the economic surplus. It is our common 
birthright as men and our common inspiration as 
Christians. The gospel is not a philosophy but a 
revelation of the supremacy of this spiritual life as, 
perfectly embodied in the historical Jesus, it con- 
quered the unspiritual order embodied in nature, 
in sin, and in death. In making it the controlling 
factor in our own spiritual self-expression, we are 
not following cunningly devised fables; we are not 
fighting against the constructive Will of an ever 
evolving universe; we are not committed to words 
and theories of the past. We are rather repeating 



THE POWER OF THE SOCIAL GOSPEL 327 

in our day the continuously expanding experience 
of God as He is known in Jesus. The meaning of 
that experience we shall make intelligible to ourselves 
in concepts drawn from our own world-view, but 
such doctrines thus formed will be but functional. 
Our children and our children's children will repeat 
the process as in their turn they seek the equivalents 
of experience in truths that shall be to them the cor- 
relate of reality. But though theologies be re- 
newed in the future as in the past, the gospel as the 
revelation in time of the eternal verities of God and 
the human soul will be final. Orthodoxies will 
replace orthodoxies, but evangelicalism as a loyalty 
of the spiritual life to Jesus Christ will abide. 
Modem men will succeed modem men, but he, the 
Christ, will continue to evoke the faith and adoring 
love of countless generations. Physical life will 
end, but the life of the spirit will abide with its Lord 
who is Spirit. Social orders will replace outgrown 
social orders, but brotherhood will expand increas- 
ingly until the Great Day when Jesus shall be su- 
preme and the successive approaches of the spiritual 
life toward him as its Type and Saviour shall have 
culminated in a social order in which sin shall be 
crushed, Christlike souls shall constitute the De- 
mocracy of the Spirit, and God shall be all in all. 



INDEX 



Ad interim ethics, alleged of the 

gospel, 262 f. 
Apocalypse, place of, in gospel, 

21. 
Arnold, Matthew, 153. 
Atonement, Pauline teaching as 

to, 185 f.; later views of, 186- 

191; fundamental element, 193. 
Augustine, 147, 295. 
Authority, and the modem man, 

51; of the gospel, 272, 282. 

Bernard of Clairvaux, 296. 
Browning, 140, 146, 

Christ, term defined, 27, 114; con- 
tent of acceptance as, 114 f. 

Christian Science and the deliv- 
erance from evil, 147 f. 

Christianity, a dehistoricalized, 
92. 

Church, fvmction of, 301 f., 309 f.; 
need of cooperation in, 322 f. 

Consubstantial, force of, 122-124. 

Creeds, inevitable, 136. 

Criticism, extreme resvdts of, 195; 
general tendency of, 108. 

Death, Hebrew thought of, 209 f.; 

and sin, 177. 
Deliverance, in the teaching of 

Jesus, 9; not mere rescue, 273. 
Devils, belief in, 37. 
Dogma, as opposed to the gospel, 

3-7, 63. 

Edwards, Jonathan, 173. 
Eschatology, in the history of 

theology, 33; in the gospel, 23; 

equivalents of, 82-85; catas- 



trophic element not to be over- 
emphasized, 265. > 

Eternal life, 265, 274. See Spir- 
itual life. 

EvangeUcalism vs. orthodoxy, 279. 

Evil, problem of, 140-143, 146 f.; 
deliverance from, 148. 

Evolution, modem man's belief in, 
36 f.; goal of, 245. 

Eucken, 270. 

Faith, justification by, 181. 
Freedom of the spiritual life, 282 f. 

God, sovereignty of, 29; imma- 
nence of, 43; as Father, 29; 
equivalent of, 81-82; as love of, 
5, 204; existence of, 143-146; 
as Saviour, 183; ethical unity of, 
as seen in the death of Jesus, 
202-204. 

Gospel, in teaching of Jesus, 7 f.; 
in the teaching of Paul, 12; as 
a message of deliverance, 10; 
only one in New Testament, 16, 
18; historical elements of, 24- 
31; methods of determining 
content of, 3 f.; how not to be 
brought to our modem world, 
66-71; how to be brought to 
the modem man, 71-90; con- 
tent of, 75-77; subject to his- 
torical inquiry, 93; Jesus as 
substance of, 109 f.; and sin, 
172 f.; alleged impracticability 
of, 241 f.; authority of, 272 ; 
salvation in, 273-277; as sug- 
gestion, 280 f.; and hatred of 
sin, 305 f . 

Gospels, when written, 96. 



329 



330 



INDEX 



Haeckel, 143, 267. 

Hatred of sin, 304 f . 

Hauptman, 156. 

Historical method in the study of 

religion, 42. 
Holy Spirit, in relation to Jesus, 

132; and the resurrection, 211; 

work of, in the soul, 288 f., 293. 
Hymns, expressions of spiritual 

life, 297, 

Immortality, argument for, 216 f. 
Individual, goal of evolution, 245. 

Jesus, birth of, 129-132; con- 
sciousness as Messiah, 12; his- 
torical character of, 103 f.; sig- 
nificance to the gospel, 109 f.; 
gospel according to, 10; evokes 
faith in himself as Saviour, 112 f.; 
sinlessness of, 116 f.; tempta- 
tion of, 118; as a revelation of 
God, 121 f.; expositions of his 
person in the New Testament, 
127 f.; as more than man, 132- 
138; a Saviour, 135 f., 150 f.; 
of the creeds, 136-138; faith of, 
159; significance of death of, 
191 f., 194 f.; heroism of, 302 f.; 
resurrection of, 159, 224-234. 

John, gospel according to, interpre- 
tation of Jesus, 107 f . 

Josephus, on resurrection, 210. 

Justice vs. brotherhood, 253. 

Logos, as incarnate in Jesus, 128- 

129. 
Luther, Martin, 296. 

Messianic hope, in the teaching of 
Jesus, 10 f.; equivalents of, 81- 
86. 

Metaphysics, modem man and, 51. 

Miracle, 46. 

Modern man, presuppositions of, 
ch. 2; in the church, 23 f.; de- 
fined, 54 f.; attitude toward 
Jesus, 113; non-religious type 
of, 266 f. 



Moody, William Vaughn, quoted, 

155. 
Myers, F. W. H., 223. 

Naturalism, champions of, 266. 
Nietzsche, 156; position dis- 
cussed, 249 f. 

Omar, 154. 

Paul, relation to Jesus, 13 f., 16 f.; 
gospel according to, 10; esti- 
mate of Jesus, 105 f.; views of 
the preexistent Christ, 127-128; 
teaching as to sin, 164; as to 
the life of the spirit, 278, 282, 
290 f . 

Pessimism, 153 f. 

Process, modern conception of, 36, 
39- 

Raymond Lull, 296. 

Regeneration, 277. 

Religion, task of, 41; germ of, 
286. 

Resurrection, as an element of 
eschatology, 84; in Jewish 
thought, 210. 

Resurrection of Jesus, objections to, 
100 f.; fact of, 159; signifi- 
cance of, 201, 234-238; argu- 
ments for, 224-228; nature of, 
228-233; significance of, 236 f. 

Reward and punishment in the 
gospel, 247. 

Sacrifice, animal, as presupposed 
by the gospel, 30. 

Salvation, 273, 287 f. 

Satan, author of evil, 37; deliver- 
ance from, and its modern 
equivalent, 140 f. 

Schopenhauer, 154. 

Sermon on the Mount, practica- 
bility of, 259. 

Sin, defined, 165 f.; in the teach- 
ing of Jesus, 161 f.; in the teach- 
ing of Paul, 164 f.; pleasures of, 
169; as a violation of God's 



INDEX 



331 



will, 17s f.; and death, 177; 
punishment of, 176 f.; salva- 
tion from, 180 f.; forgiveness of, 
200 f. 

Sodal solidarity, belief in, by the 
modem man, 48. 

Society, not final and of evolution, 
24s; a means to freedom, 245. 

Sovereignty of God, modem equiva- 
lent of, 81-82. 

Spiritual life, as related to the 



gospel, 77, 87-89; social con- 
tent of, 121, 299 f.; a life of 
love, 293; its freedom, 282 f.; 
democracy of, 284; and the 
natiural order, 302; heroism of, 
302. 

Tolerance, limitation of, 306 f. 

Virgin birth of Jesus, 129-132. 
Von Hartmann, 153, 156. 



THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING 

ORDER 

By Dr. SHAILER MATHEWS 

Professor of New Testament History and Interpretation 
in the University of Chicago 

Cloth i2mo $i'50 net 

"... a most interesting and valuable contribution to the litera- 
ture of a subject that is growing in popular attention every day. 
While among the deeply, really religious and genuinely scientilic 
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have only caught the forms of religious and scientific knowledge 
without their spirit. This book is addressed much more, it seems, 
to the religious than the scientific, possibly because the latter have 
the less need for repentance. Those who are troubled in any way 
at the seeming conflict between the demands of faith, on the one 
hand, and the experiences of their own reason and the problems of 
modern social and industrial life will find here much sage, illumi- 
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Other Books by Professor Mathews 

THE SOCIAL TEACHINGS OF JESUS 

AN ESSAY IN CHRISTIAN SOCIOLOGY 

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"The author is scholarly, devout, awake to all modern thought, 
and yet conservative and preeminently sane." — Congregationalist. 



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The History of New Testament Times in Palestine 

TAe Congregationalist says of Prof. Shailer Mathews's " The Social 
Teachings of Jesus " : " Rereading deepens the impression that the 
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with Jesus' attitude toward man, society, the family, the state, and 
wealth, the reader will not agree with us in this opinion, we greatly err 
as prophets." 

The History of the Textual Criticism of the New Testament 

Prof. Marvin R. Vincent, Professor of New Testament Exegesis, 
Union Theological Seminary. 

Professor Vincent's contributions to the study of the New Testament 
rank him among the first American exegetes. His most recent publica- 
tion is " A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistles to the 
Philippians and to Philemon " (" International Critical Commentary "), 
which was preceded by a " Students' New Testament Handbook," 
"Word Studies in the New Testament," and others. 

The History of the Higher Criticism of the New Testament 

Prof. Henry S. Nash, Professor of New Testament Interpretation, 
Cambridge Divinity School. 

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Introduction to the Books of the New Testament 

Prof. B. WiSNER Bacon, Professor of New Testament Interpretation, 
Yale University. 

Professor Bacon's works in the field of Old Testament criticism include 
"The Triple Tradition of Exodus," and "The Genesis of Genesis," a 
study of the documentary sources of the books of Moses. In the field 
of New Testament study he has published a number of brilliant papers, 
the most recent of which is " The Autobiography of Jesus," in the 
American Journal of Theology. 



The Teaching of Jesus 

Prof. George B. Stevens, Professor of Systematic Theology, Yale 
University. 

Professor Stevens's volumes upon " The Johannine Theology," " The 
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the New Testament," have made him probably the most prominent 
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the most important of his works. 



The Biblical Theology of the New Testament 

Prof. E. P. Gould, Professor of New Testament Interpretation, Protes- 
tant Episcopal Divinity School, Philadelphia. 

Professor Gould's Commentaries on the Gospel of Mark (in the " In- 
ternational Critical Commentary") and the Epistles to the Corinthians 
(in the "American Commentary") are critical and exegetical attempts 
to supply those elements which are lacking in existing works of the same 
general aim and scope. 

" An excellent series of scholarly, yet concise and inexpensive New 
Testament handbooks." — Christian Advocate, New York. 

" These books are remarkably well suited in language, style, and price, 
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CHRISTIANITY AND THE SOCIAL CRISIS 

By the Rev. WALTER RAUSCHENBUSCH 

Professor of Church History in Rochester Theological Seminary 

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" It is of the sort to make its readers feel that the book was bravely 
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though the theme be sad and serious, to be charmed with." — N. Y. 
Times' Sat. Review p/ Books. 

THE APPROACH TO THE SOCIAL QUESTION 

An Introduction to the Study of Social Ethics 

By FRANCIS GREENWOOD PEABODY 

Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in Harvard University 

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In a highly engaging manner the author sets forth the ways which 
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THE ETHICS OF JESUS 

By HENRY CHURCHILL KING, D.D., LL.D. 

President of Oberlin College 

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by analyzing these teachings he brings out " their unity, sweep, and in- 
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